Tag: Water Rat

Our lives on a couple of boats – Part Three

Well, so far we have arrived in Amsterdam and sold Mjojo and bought the Good Old Water Rat, and continued to settle in A’dam, that most pleasing of cities and next thing was to start converting Water Rat into a house on the water, which occupied us for the next 20 odd years, and finally was more or less finished about a month before we finally left Holland and went to live in France – also another story worth telling, probably I have already told in this blog, have a look at the various posts, there are 201 after all, and you will find various accounts of our lives in La Douce France.

At our mooring at the Entrepotdok in Amsterdam – with a load of firewood for the winter

The first job we had to start the conversion of the Water Rat into a house was to take up the planks that were on the floor of the hold, and grease all the steel-work on the inside of the hull bottom.    So, that is what we did, heating up the grease so that it ran nicely into the corners and so on under the hold floor.  Whilst as a barge, she was a relatively small vessel, this was still a hell of a big job as far as we were concerned – but in due time it was finished and we could put back all the planks that were the hold floor and start to consider how we wanted to convert her into a house.

All of this took a very long time, as we were far from fanatical about it all, and also we had to earn our livings as well – in my case that was as a model maker, chiefly working for museums and similar, and Lotty was a teacher at the International School of Amsterdam.   Also, we wanted to enjoy ourselves and use the Water Rat to see the Netherlands, so we chugged happily around the country enjoying ourselves with the freedom that she gave us.   We could – and did – fill her up with water at the fuel bunker ships along all the major canals, and at night we could simply head for the side of the river or canal and tie her up to a handy tree and enjoy ourselves in the quiet country side.

As we had the engine running at the same speed all day long, she was very economical with diesel fuel, and considering that she had what was in effect a large truck engine, our fuel costs were not unreasonable.   We also became really expert at dealing with the many locks we encountered, or bridges that had to be opened for us to pass under them, and on a number of occasions we ventured out into what was in effect the north sea, the Ijsselmeer to the north of Amsterdam, where on occasions we found ourselves in a dodgy situation as barges are not really designed to sail in rough water – one of the drawbacks of having a vessel with a flat bottom, waves get under it and push you over………

Anyhow, happily this never happened to us, though we did have our teeth clenching moments.

One of the things about the Water Rat was that as she wasn’t laden with cargo, her bows were actually out of the water, so on one occasion whilst in a very small canal in Friesland, and found our way blocked by a bridge that had a sign on it telling us that it would next open in June…….   And this was in April!   So, as it was not really possible to reverse for the many kilometers to the larger canal that we had turned off.  I thought about it for a while, and came to the conclusion that the only solution was to set the bows up on the canal bank and turn on that fulcrum.  So, I did just that, scaring the hell out of a flock of sheep who were grazing in that field when suddenly a very large steel thing came at them, and managed to get about 8 or so meters onto their field.   Anyhow, it worked OK, and we sailed without a care back to the bigger canal.

Maintaining our mobile home was an annual event, every year we went to a beach on the tidal river Lek, and when the tide went out we ensured that the Water Rat was nice and high and dry, and over a couple of tides we would tar the whole of her ides, up to and over the water line.   Then every alternate year, we had to go onto a slip and do the same, as well as under her hull…   As you can see in the photos, this was a hell of a lot of work – she may have been a small barge, but she was still damn big!

Me and Jake engaged in spreading tar all over the Water Rat

Slowly we converted her… clad the walls inside the hold with tongue and groove pine, installed a working kitchen, built a shower and lavatory, created a bed (raised) for us and a decent cabin at the bows for Jake and generally made her into a civilised home… And the finishing touch we finally achieved about 3 months before we sold her and left the Netherlands and moved to France, which was installing an efficient oil fired central heating system.

With some extremely good friends, one of our favourite people, Margot. The kitchen is behind me and the wood stove is in the foreground…
One of those geese was named Diner….. With an obvious intention on our part… But it never happened, and we later heard that she lived to a ripe old age as a free spirit on the canals of Amsterdam…………

At about this time, I created a steel and copper model of the Water Rat for the Maritime museum, the model was about a meter long…

Well, in a way, that is the story of our various house boats, after that we lived in boring houses…  Well not really – In France we lived in a ruined granite mine and in Australia we have actually built our house from the ground up, with our hands…   Anyhow, that is it for now.

Our lives on a couple of boats – Part One

Just before I left the Roundhouse Theatre in London in 1974 (in itself that is a story worth knowing!  Link to that story) , we decided that we would sail to Australia (as one does) and via a friend we found the ideal boat for this voyage, Mjojo, and lived on her for a couple of years and made various passages around the English coast and finally we set off to sail to Australia, but ran into incredible South Western storms, with waves taller than the mast of Mjojo, so rather than fight our way into this ridiculous storm, we gave in and turned around, and ended up in Amsterdam, where we lived on her (with occasional trips into the North Sea) for about 2 years until the birth of our son.

Mjojo was her name, and she was perhaps the most beautiful sailing boat you could imagine.   She had been designed by an English architect, Rod Pickering, based on a combination of ideas, the boat that Joshua Slocum used when he sailed around the world, the Spray, and the boats that were in use every day in the Indian Ocean, so he had her built on Lamu, an island off the coast of Kenya by the guys there who normally built Dhows for the local sailors.

The building off Mjojo is an epic tale in itself, and well worth reading, so here is a link to the website of Jojo, Rod’s daughter after whom the boat was named:

Mjojo=Little Jojo.       https://islandswift.blogspot.com/2014/08/mjojo.html

In passing I would like to point out that you will read in Jojo’s account, that Mjojo was kept in Amsterdam and started to rot.  This is true, but not while we had her.  We sold her to a local when our son was born (1976) when it became apparent that we would have to stay in Holland as we were told our son would need medication for his entire life – this turned out not to be true, by the way.

Anyhow, here are some photos of Mjojo in all her glory to show you what a beautiful vessel she was – and is.

Just for your information, she was 42 feet long (+bowsprit of 15 feet), beam was 15 feet, she drew 7 feet along her entire keel so she was incredibly stable and was a gaff rigged cutter.  Oh, and she weighed 24 tons, because of the incredibly heavy wood she was built from (72 pounds a cubic foot!).

Anyway, as I said, on the birth of our son we thought that we would have to stay in Holland for his entire childhood, and as I have pointed out earlier in this post, keeping an ocean going wooden sailboat in the fresh water of Amsterdam wasn’t a good idea for a wooden boat – also she was a bit small for us to actually live in if we were staying in Amsterdam.   So we sold her to a German guy who apparently had all manner of plans for her, none of which actually occurred, so she started to rot, poor boat.

We borrowed a flat from a friend in a small town near to Amsterdam and set about looking for a steel barge to live in (and to wander around Europe’s extensive network of inland water-ways in).   After some months, we found a likely barge, called Eerste Zorg (which means First Worry ) a 28 meter long steel barge, built in 1924, registered to carry 120 tons and we could afford her asking price.  So we negotiated with the owner, and reached agreement and then came to great day when we would have to take her over.

Nerve wracking to say the least, as I had never tried to sail such a large vessel, and one that only had an engine as well.    So I went to Papendrecht (just to the south of Rotterdam) to take her over, and the owner agreed to sail with me up to Rotterdam so that I had a chance to see how it all worked.

So that is what happened.

Together we sailed, well, I say sailed, actually it was a question of driving her, up to Rotterdam and once there, the previous owner tied us up to a jetty and went on his merry way, leaving me with the job of getting her from Rotterdam to Amsterdam on my own.  Lotty, my wife, had driven me down to meet the previous owner, and then driven back to Amsterdam.

Gulp!

Anyhow, taking my courage in my hands…  I set off up the river Lek, which leads from Rotterdam to the start of the Amsterdam-Rijn canal, which as its name would suggest, connects the Rijn (Rhine) to Amsterdam.   At this point in its journey to the North Sea the Rhine is called the Lek.

The Lek is a very wide river, and much used by all manner of cargo barges of all sizes, and I quickly realised that my 120 ton 28 meter Luxe Motor (that is the name of its type of barge) is a really small vessel.   I was surrounded by barges of 500 tons to huge combinations of 3000 ton lighters connected up in threes to a sort of super pushing boat hurtling along at upwards of 30 kilometers per hour – to put this in context, my little barge could only manage about 11 kilometers per hour.

Altogether alarming to put it mildly!

After about an hour of this nerve wracking stuff, there was suddenly an explosion below me, in the engine room of my barge, and the motor stopped.   So there I was, effectively in the fast lane of an aquatic motorway with a barge without an engine.

I rushed to the bows, and managed to drop the anchor, which was huge!  Luckily it gripped the river bottom, and I swung around so my stern was pointing down river to Rotterdam, and there I was, stuck.

Various barges honked at me as basically I was blocking the “fast Lane” but there was nothing I could do about it.

After a while, a police boat appeared and came alongside to demand to know what the hell I thought I was playing at, anchoring in the middle of a hugely busy river and holding every one up.

Once one of these cops came on board, and I was able to show him what had happened (peering into my engine room at an obviously destroyed engine), he said to me that I should crank up the anchor and they would tow me to a repair yard to get things looked at.

This caused the next embarrassment for me…  How the hell do you bring up an anchor on such a boat?   I had no idea how to do that, and feeling idiotic, I told the cop this.   So, with the patience of Job, he showed me how it worked, and clambered back onto his boat and gave me a tow rope to secure to my bows, and we hauled up the anchor, see photo below for the size of it, and off we went.

Anyhow, to cut a very long story short, it turned out that the motor was totally destroyed, and it would be necessary to replace it, and as I had bought the barge “as is” I had no claim on the previous owner.  So, I gritted my teeth and told the ship yard to go ahead and bung another – more modern – engine into her.

So, after this exciting start to our ownership of what became the Water Rat (chosen because it is the same in Dutch and English) began.

And for the following 24 years we lived in her traveled around Holland in her and generally had a great life on her.

So, in a following installment I shall tell all about how that all went….

In the mean time, here is a photo of her in all her glory at a later mooring in Amsterdam, along side the Maritime Museum for whom I made models somewhat later…….

If you have any thoughts on any of the above, or sailed on Mjojo or the Water Rat please drop me a line to tell me about how it all went.