My Narrowboat Nemesis - Story so far - Part One

Watch the boat: George Clarke's Amazing Spaces on 4OD: http://bit.ly/TsKcDR

Once upon a time, in the latter parts of the 2007 Formula 1 season - whilst I was working for Bridgestone Motorsport in Langley, Slough - I bought a narrowboat to be my abode for the rare occasions that I wasn’t at races or tests. Or sleeping in hedges.

I had no previous experience of canals or real experience of boating save for the Dover-Calais ferry or playing with small sailing boats when I was 15.

The purchase of a narrowboat was justified thus:

·        Cheaper than a renting / buying a house/flat
·        Kinda cool
·        Interesting project
 
I made the final decision to buy the boat whilst in São Paulo, fueled by the national drink of caipirinha    and egged on by my Bridgestone chums. Thanks Sam.

I bought the boat from the world’s most popular outlet for alcohol-induced purchases – ebay. It was described as 80% complete.

Called Nemesis, inside was a 'part-finished’, outside was battleship grey primer, painted over the previous paint job. And the engine didn’t work.  

Brass Monkey

I took ownership of the boat in December 2007 and my first night on the boat was in -7°C. A metal vessel in a frozen canal is not a warm place to be.

As I preserved with the project on which I’d blown my life’s savings, it became clear that it wasn’t – in its then state at least – a viable abode. This came into focus one night when it was so cold I determined that it was actually warmer (in relative terms…) to sleep under the bed to take advantage of a mattress-worth of insulation above me. This was fine until I woke in the middle of the night, tried to sit upright and knocked myself out on the wooden underframe of the boat, waking up some time later with a black eye.

In fact, in the cold light of day I concluded that the more realistic ratio of completedness was rather: 20% finished / 80% unfinished. Work clearly needed to be done.

A lack of additional cash to spend on the boat allied to the emergence of a girlfriend on the scene (with a mostly warm house) meant that the boat went on the back-burner for a while. Then a little longer.

Over the course of the first season of ownership I largely determined that everything previously ‘completed’ on the boat needed starting again, so I set about ripping out some of the interior. Glass fibre ‘wool’ type insulation and cheap ply-wood was replaced with Kingspan insulation board. Then I got distracted.

Lewis Hamilton won the Drivers’ World Championship. Then Jenson Button did too. The Sebastian Vettel won two. Somewhere amidst that the world’s economy fell apart too. And Bridgestone left Formula 1 – meaning that the concept of having a convenient crash pad minutes from their office was left rather redundant.  

2012 and beyond

And then part way through Seb progressing through to his third title, a good friend of mine got in touch: ‘Wouldn’t it be a good idea to get the boat finished? And there’s a TV programme interested too.’

Not being one to miss out on an opportunity for a comedy TV appearance (F1 drivers usually get in the way of most of mine), I jumped at the chance.

This was something of a daft idea as:

a)    It was the middle of the F1 season and I was kinda busy.

b)    I was also at that point attending MotoGP and Le Mans events.
c)    Away from motor sport, I was also attempting to create ‘World of Sheds’ in the garden of my house – consuming time and money.
d)    I didn’t want to spend much money on the project (see above point c).

No matter, James Dixon – legend of times of old in what became the British Universities Karting Championship – www.bukc.co.uk – and co-composer of I Got The No Poo Blues (a song which acknowledges the physiological impact of staying on a canal boat shorn of toiletry facilities) persuaded me that a design project on the boat would be a dead cool idea, and in addition he’d assist with his fine CAD skills.

To actually build the designs, friend of even longer standing and former www.waitrose.com weekend colleague Jules Clapham of www.claphamjoinery.co.uk jumped at the idea to become involved in the ambitious project.

And so, the three amigos concocted plans in a warm ale dispensing beverage house.

Disaster!

The original plan was to have a full CAD inside and outside of the boat to be able to play with ideas and concepts, then with reflective methodology the parts would be finely crafted by Jules back at the workshop and on the boat itself.

Unfortunately, James became otherwise occupied with life so the CAD methodology went by the wayside, to be replaced by me and Jules sketching on beer mats at www.thestapletonarms.com to come up with the concepts, with Jules’ father Andy adding enormous wisdom and insight – particularly in the latter stages.

Talking Heads

It soon became evident that me and Jules are particularly good at talking and coming up with what we agreed were good ideas. Then talking some more. Then replacing the ideas with other ideas. Jules even talked so much that one mobile phone supplier cut off his mobile to free up network space for other users.

Time waits for no man and the time to actually get hands dirty, but before we could do any work on the inside, we needed the boat to be a moveable entity as it was booked in to be painted.

Motorhead

Two parts of the build this year were completed by www.high-line.co.uk – the fine boatyard where Nemesis is moored, whose personnel put up with my weird and wonderful ideas. Fixing a replacement engine was the first task as I supplied various ebay-sourced replacements from which a working replacement was fashioned. Then disaster struck as the Aqua-drive coupling – the clever bit which takes the drive from the engine to the propeller, whilst dampening and accommodating a different angle of approach – decided it was time to cease to work.

Nemesis was originally built in 1989 it had been sat with a non-functioning engine for quite some time before I bought it, so it was no surprise really that a part which had lay dormant, unmoved by the suck, squeeze, bang, push from three cylinders of Mitsubishi’s finest, so the rude awakening of a functioning engine was sufficient to render it inoperable.

Unfortunately, the particular flavour of Aqua-drive fitted to Nemesis was – of course – a non-standard size. And that non-standard size was no longer made. Two options were available – change everything to fit a standard size, or find a replacement of the twenty-year obsolete size which fitted. Miraculously, after some serious searching boatyards and brokers the correct one was found and fitted.

This all took time, and the boat was only just ready for the next part of the build – painting the outside.

Painting By Numbers

You can paint narrowboats yourself, but that takes a lot of time and no small measure of skill to complete a reasonable job. I had neither time nor skill, so www.high-line.co.uk were once more employed. All they needed was me to decide on which colours…

Now, when we were planning the CAD modelling of the boat, we would have had a nice 3D model to play with colours. We didn’t have this so the choice was made at the very last minute over the phone, which is always a good way to spend a lot of money.  

Let the work begin!

Boat painted and with a working engine, it was time to complete the strip-out started some four years prior, so hammers and pry bars were employed. When ironmongery was insufficient, as in the case of the gravity defying stove - so angle grinders were used.

In the next post, read how I painted myself into a corner, nearly flooded the boat, and how it all came together to be broadacast on Channel 4...