What's up with the weather?

I really don't know what is up with the weather! It was raining hard this morning when I took Annie out for a walk, but had dried up by the time I came to work. The sun has been out all day until about 4pm when we had horrendous winds which blew a big black cloud over which deposited the wet stuff at an alarming rate...

I went out this morning to do some shopping and to get a tyre replaced. It is amazing how many people you meet in Newport that are customers - a quick trip round the town takes a couple of hours. It's good to see familiar faces though which hasn't always been the case.

I came to Norbury back in the summer of 2005. My parents had previously moved out to Spain and I was uncertain as to what I wanted to do, although I had a secure job with Nationwide Building Society and was living aboard a comfortable pleasure boat in Northamptonshire. I took the plunge, sold up and moved out to Spain only to return 2 months later as I missed the cut and my friends too much! So I returned to the UK and helped one of my friends setup a carrying business on the canal. It was obvious from the outset that it wasn't a long term agreement so I started looking around for alternative forms of employment. I ended up here at Norbury, first on pumpout duties, but soon progressing to Wharf Supervisor and shortly later the Manager. The rest has been history... In the November of the same year I bought Hyperion which I returned to near original condition and then passed her onto her next custodian in January 2010. I now own the converted river class butty Ant which was one of the last carrying boats built by E.C Jones at Brentford for British Waterways in 1970. She is a great boat, not the prettiest of designs but very practical for her current use.

Here's a picture of her laid at Braunston prior to being converted to a motorboat.


And here is one of now.


Anyway, back to today...

Bernard has serviced an engine on a private boat and has been in the depths of the dry dock this afternoon replacing the bottom rudder bearing and fitting a set of anodes. Fred (I think has been asleep with Bernard) has blacked the boat on the dock and painted the counter bands. He has also been kept busy with boats on the wharf and has been down into one of our cesspits recovering items that are not intended to be in there! Graham has been working on Hawthorne today, we are really starting to see some progress now and I will try and get you some pictures tomorrow. Lee is cracking on with the boat that he has in the dock and has also been doing some other painting works on another private boat that we have in for some works this week.

I had a good evening out last night whilst moving cars around for friends that are off boating. That's always the problem, isn't it? You move the boat and then you need to get back to the car! When I was doing alot of travelling around the canal system with my parent's back in the 90s, my Dad was always deployed to go and get the car. Obviously it is much easier if you have a friend to do a car shuffle but it regularly entailed a bike ride, bus trip and train ride.

Anyway, I think that is enough for today.

Let's see what tomorrow brings... Apparently it's going to rain again :-(

Regards,

David