Oscar Wilde once said that whisky mixed with water is the ruination of two drinks. Worse than that, whisky and canal or river water can be the ruination of a healthy pair of lungs. My worst ‘falling in’ story involves a bike, a friend, a ninety degree bend in the Regents Canal, and a few pints of beer. The friend, James O‘Regan, and I had been trying to buy shares in a beverage company by attempting to impress the shareholders and board of directors with an aggressive and significant increase on their turnover. By the end of our strategy meeting, as much as we tried to search for it, we’d completely lost the plot. James, whilst being ‘two up’ on my bicycle, realised we were about to get very wet unless I remembered the ninety degree bend in the canal. He got off. I carried on pedalling. I think I was six foot over the water before I remembered that bicycles don’t have a reverse gear. I was back pedalling faster than a bumblebee in a vacuum cleaner, but still got very wet. Apart from that occasion, I have remained remarkably lucky. There was of course the time the yeti and I were rescuing a boat in one of the minor floods. It was dark, the gunwhales of the boat were narrow, I slipped and fell in up to my waist. Not that the water wasn’t deep, it was just that I managed to hold onto one of the ‘riser’ poles as I slid in.“Wooga, wooga, bang, bang”. Well of course nobody was going to know I’d fallen in unless he split on me. We went for a beer at the Lock & Weir. Our friends might well have believed my story about Mrs Lockeeper not having time to dry the washing properly which was why I had to go outside three times to empty my wellies, if there was such a thing as a discreet wookie.
What does give me great pleasure to relate is the time that Mrs Lockeeper fell in.Mrs Lockeeper doesn’t like pubs. The only reason she ever goes into one is to make me come out of one. How can a Lockeeper enjoy a pint of beer when their wife is either staring at them malevolently or theatrically taking a notebook and pencil out of their handbag and scribbling down houskeeping numbers with a great big minus in front of them? Unless Alan invited her for a drink. Alan is from up North. He is a jolly good looking earth moving machine operator type chappie with a full head of hair and a full wallet. He was the machine operator on a contract to dredge parts of the river, and I stupidly said he could park his caravan in our garden for the duration. One evening I was looking forward to putting my feet up after having cooked the supper, washed up, helped the kids with their homework, washed the kids, washed up again, walked the border collie pup, and looked up ‘self rightous’ in the theasaurus. Mrs Lockeeper and ‘poor lonely’ Alan were at the pub. Across the river at around midnight I heard the sound of an outboard engine being revved to within an inch of another trip to an outboard engine shop. Mrs Lockeeper and Mr ‘my other car is a 360 degree twenty ton pose mobile earth mover’ were leaving the Lock & Weir pub. When they’d finally tacked and slalomed over to my side of the river, Alan got out, unfortunately about five feet from the bank. It must of finally hit home to him what Mrs Lockeeper had been saying to him all night. But she was proven wrong. He couldn’t after all, walk on water. Mrs Lockeeper got out as well. She stood in eighteen inches of water and clambered on to the jetty. She suggested that the lock cut needed dredging, and wondered out loud where one could find a dredger driver at that time of night. The ‘sorry you haven’t got a gorgeous full thatch of chestnut hair, you bald London git’ dredger driver eventually surfaced and swam to shore. She’d been standing on his shoulders. The lock cut was one dredger driver plus Mrs Lockeeper’s two shins deep.
One winter Saturday afternoon Megan the border collie pup on heat, Alan the ‘I can teach you how to appear at a backdoor looking desperately undernourished three times a day anywhere in the country’ macho machine operator and I were having a quiet beer at the Lock & Weir. In walked a fisherman. He asked if anybody had a piece of rope. We said we had several, but thanked him for asking anyway. He said somebody had fallen in up river. Being a bald git makes me more aerodynamic and faster than the ‘I could be a hairdressers model anytime I wanted to’ merchant, and while Alan was still putting his comb back in his back pocket, Megan the border collie pup on heat and I had the dinghy fired up and were planing upstream. After half a mile, three nesting coots who must of come to the conclusion that it would be quicker to start from scratch, a pair of shagging water voles who’d got an unexpected gobfull of water and five swans who thought they might have taken a wrong turn at Avonmouth later, we found one man and his dog in the water. The bank was very steep but his dog had found a little ledge at the waters edge to sit on. I tried to be tactful. I suggested it was a spooky coincidence that his skin colour was the same shade of blue as my newly decorated bathroom. He said he’d simply been walking straight down the towpath and just slipped in. I suggested that in future he allowed for the fact that the towpath was a bit bent in places. He said he’d be writing to his MP. I hauled him and his dog into the boat. His dog was interested in Megan the border collie pup on heat. Megan was interested in the dog and started reversing a lot. The man said he was cold. I suggested that he might like to keep warm by trying to get his dog out of mine. I set off for civilisation. By the time we arrived we were met by two fire engines and an ambulance. My first thought was that Alan must have broken a nail and called the emergency services. Then I realised that the fisherman had dialled 999. I handed the now sweating man over to our phosphorescent friends. They said they couldn’t take the dog and so I had to look after it until the man’s daughter arrived. I went for a swift pint. What seemed like hours later the two dogs had lost several pints of pheromones and I, several pints of patience. Alan reappeared from some small room with a mirror. He had indeed broken a nail by hastily putting his comb back in his back pocket, but was told that all emergency services were busy looking for a wet die hard roman towpath walker. The dog was by this time so worked up he had lost all sense or care about pretty border collie bitch recognition. As any leg would do I handed him to Alan and took the dinghy home. That must of ruffled his hair a bit.
Probably the most dangerous incident involved a hire boat at Hanham. Two families were on this particular boat, and all concerned seemed quite sensible. But nevertheless they’d been drinking a little wine. They were just pulling up to the Lock & Weir pub when they started a bit of horsing about. The result was one man in the water at the back of the boat being tickled by a propellor that had been ordered to go full astern, being held round the waist by another man who couldn’t let go in order to take the engine out of gear. They were reversing straight towards the weir. The man in the water was not only in danger of going through the propellor, he would also have prevented any scratches on the underside of the boat that might be caused by the weir ledge, due to the fact that he was the twain that would ensure the two would never meet. With twenty feet to spare, one of the wives came out on deck and was told how to put the gear lever in neutral. Two of my quick thinking friends had shot across in a dinghy and got an anchor down. Whilst the emergency services were on their way they put me on board and I checked the chap over. He had got away with a sliced shin. We then moved the boat onto the pub moorings.
I know three stories about people going through a propellor. One involved a trip boat company (The Jenny Wren) I had occasionally worked for in London, one family that were friends of my sister in law lost a nine year old son, and one friend of mine, Captain Rick, had a son who was a sub officer in the firebrigade. They had been called to an incident where a women had gone through a propellor and the whole watch had needed counselling for weeks afterwards.
One time I nearly had a chat with the angels was in London and involved a trip boat called Perseus, (operated by the London Waterbus Co.) I was to skipper her first trip of the season and had the job of ‘de-wintering’ the engine before taking sixty old ladies on a tour.I did all the engine checks and fired it up, letting it warm through nice and slowly. After about ten minutes I started to move two adjacent trip boats (Milton and Gardenia) so I could manoevre Perseus out. Then the engine revs started to increase. And then they increased a bit more. I left the boats drifting about on long lines and clambered back down into the engine ‘hole’. The revs still increased and very soon the engine was screaming. The engine stop wouldn’t work and smoke was billowing out from places where it shouldn’t have. Desperately trying to remember where the pulley belts and nasty high speed spinning things were, I tried to feel my way towards the injector pump. I found it but it ignored my attempts to disable it. The noise was incredible and visibility was long gone. I decided to retreat as I was sure something was about to give, and I didn’t want something giving through me. Out on the back deck I could see that the whole pool of Little Venice was covered in a pall of smoke. Two boats were drifting aimlessly about and two people were running down the towpath armed with fire extinguishers. The only thing I had control over was the engine throttle, and thanks to my good old dad and his lateral thinking, the only way I could change any of these horrific conditions was to give the engine full throttle. Quite quickly the revs died away and the engine ground to a halt. I think I said ‘gosh ‘ a lot. My friend, Ray Farrow (our British Waterways policeman), was very out of breath when he finally got to me and couldn’t speak, which was a shame, because everytime he did speak, he said something terribly funny.
It turns out that the world and his wife had either experienced or had heard about an engine ‘running away’. After a couple of days I wouldn’t have been surprised if a baby in a passing pushchair hadn’t leaned towards me and told me that if only I’d put a rag over the air intake, I could have stopped the engine quite quickly. When I’d ckecked the oil, the level was fine. What I hadn’t noticed in the gloom of the engine room, was that there was about two inches of diesel on top of the oil. The lift pump had been leaking fuel into the oil sump all winter, and when the engine had warmed up enough, it started burning fuel from the bottom of the cylinders. Woops. The mechanic who came to look at it said that this paticular type of engine could develop seventeen and a half thousand revs once it had run away, which compared quite unfavourably with the two and a half thousand it was deigned to achieve at maximum.My giving it full throttle had drowned the process.Everybody then proceeded to tell me all their ‘con rods though the eye ball’ stories. Every now and again I wonder what I would have done if the engine had run away after the old ladies had got on board. They probably would have mentioned the war.
