Caterpillars? In my broccoli?
This is our second summer on the boat, and therefore, my second summer to try to grow anything that isn’t a beginner-level herb on our back deck (though you’ll notice I still can’t say no to lavender, mint, rosemary, and basil!).
I was feeling a bit limited by our pots, however, so I spied an alternate use for an old drawer that used to be beneath the captains cabin bunkbeds. After drilling a bunch of drainage holes along the downhill edge and coating the whole thing in a layer of varnish, I filled it up with some compost and planted in a bunch of french bean and broccoli sproutlings I’d grown from seed in the wheelhouse (which doubles nicely as a greenhouse with all those windows!).
Here’s some shots of the garden as it is now, mid-summerish:
Now, you may be confused about the title, but I’d noticed a week or so ago that my broccoli was starting to look decidedly Emmentalish, and I found the cause to be an awful lot of very hungry caterpillars. Some are of the big black variety, and others are still only at the tiny green stage, but all have to be picked off every night and sent overboard to their watery graves so my poor plants have at least some hope of feeding us come Spring!
I’m hoping I’ve got the bulk of the critters and eggs now, so hopefully my tedious evening ritual of checking the underside of every single leaf won’t continue much longer… I’ve suddenly got a new respect for organic broccoli farmers!
Thankfully, they seem to not like the taste of beans at all, because the leaves are fine and I’m able to pick an extraordinary amount of them every single night. Here’s just one night’s picking, and I get this many about every night….
I’ve been told to pick the big ones regularly to make sure the plant keeps producing, so it means we’ve pretty much got a constant supply of really tasty green beans in the fridge at all times.
Clear the deck
You wouldn’t think it’d take that long to grind down the main deck, but with our noise restrictions meaning we can only work on Saturday mornings (since we’re at work during the week and arrive home during quiet hours), the weather being generally uncooperative, and social plans getting in the way, we’ve only just completed the last of the deck grinding this weekend!
The red areas are everywhere we’ve taken off the existing layers of uneven paint and rust down to the bare steel, and then temporarily protected these areas from the elements with red oxide. The next step is to rough up everything with a wire brush and then (finally!) we can roller on our green Hammerite.
...and then start on the side decks. We didn’t realise we’d bought the Forth Bridge...
The other progress on our big list is that James was finally able to locate the inverted electrical socket last night. The power for the moorings (and half the street) went out last night and it seemed as good a time as any to switch on the inverter and start plugging our work light into mystery sockets. We figured it must be in the engine room, but none of those lit the test bulb, and neither did the socket directly next to the inverter… But one of the sockets in the wheelhouse did, so through a bit of an extension cable, we were able to plug our water pump in up there so we can still wash up and flush the toilets. The next step is to determine if the inverter can handle the cold and hot water pumps at the same time, meaning we could theoretically have hot showers while unplugged or on the move!
And in other electrical news, our galvanic isolator has arrived! James reckons it should be pretty straightforward to install, so fingers crossed he doesn’t end up with an Einstein ‘do!
1 down, 8 to go
We’ve developed a mornng routine over the last few weeks. When the sun comes up, Bosco comes thumping down the stairs, hops over our heads, settles on the boxes on the shelf behind the bed and purrs loudly, filled with pride at his night full of exploits.
Recent exploits have included “scaring away a fox,” “jumping sylph-like from boat to boat” and “scaring off the other cats to become King of the Moorings,” so he always has something to tell us.
Which is why it was a surprise when he was a no-show this morning. So at about 4:30 I poked my head up into the wheelhouse, expecting to see him snoozing on the sofa up there. Oh well, I tried to convince myself, he’s still out `splorin’ and he’ll be back when he’s hungry. I’d already been out twice the night before tracking him down when I had a bad feeling, and Melissa is starting to call me paranoid. So I went back to bed and dozed for a while, keeping one ear open for the sound of a relatively graceless cat thudding back in through the open wheelhouse window.
By 6 I was getting really worried – and was that a meow I just heard? So I threw on my dressing gown, fully expecting to see him catching sun on the roof, and trundled off to look for him. First positive sign: pawprints in the dew on deck, obviously he’d been around since sunup. First negative sign: The unholy wailing coming from under the collar barge next to us. I managed to squeeze into a position where I could look down and sure enough, a very bedraggled Bosco was literally hanging on for dear life. Only the top half of him was out of the water and we know how cold that river is. He was panicking and yelling and even when I called him I don’t think he knew what was going on any more.
The next few minutes is a bit of a blur. Fortunately he’d given us some warning that he was Captain Clumsy of the Klutz Corps by nearly taking a dip last week, which prompted me to go to Decathlon and buy the biggest, sturdiest fishing net they sell. I ran for it – barefoot, nearly slipping in the river myself – and ran back, extending it to full stretch as I went.
If you’ve ever tried to net a panicking cat with a seven foot pole out of fast-flowing water, you’ll know exactly what happened next. At full extension, the pole wasn’t strong enough to hold his weight, so it bent, leaving him back at square one. I decided I couldn’t do it myself so I ran back to give Melissa a rude awakening. I definitely used some bad words in describing the situation. She came flying out, grabbing a barge hook on the way.
When we got back to the end of the collar barge, Bosco’s howling had woken up the new neighbour’s kids, who were watching the situation with concern. I managed to get under the walkway between two collar barges (this is suicidally dangerous, never do it) and use the now five-foot pole to try and net him again. Fortunately this time it held and with Melissa’s help I was able to get him safely out of the water. From the noises he was making, being in the net was not a significantly better option.
We got him back inside and started towelling him down:
He was so exhausted and traumatised at this point that he wasn’t even Bosco. I’ve never seen a cat so tired that his tail is literally limp, but his was so lifeless I was worried he’d broken a vertebra on the way down. Every so often as we had to move him he’d howl five or six times and start trembling again. I don’t know how long he was in the water, but he was cold. It took us a good two hours to get him even close to properly warmed up again.
It took plenty of grooming (to make the fur dry faster) and liberal application of the hairdryer and electric blanket, but finally about 8am he had the strength to crawl into his Safe Place under the bed and stay there for a couple of hours licking his (luckily metaphorical) wounds. He must have been starving because he was so busy snapping cat treats out of my fingers that he chomped into my thumb and drew blood. Never mind biting the hand that feeds you, trust Bosco to bite the hand that drags you out of a freezing river and then feeds you.
Fleas, release me
A visit to our friends Pip and Rob at the weekend brought home something about Bosco: at a year old he’s twice the size of their fully-grown cat. And he will probably grow for another year yet, at least if his appetite is anything to go by. Yet he’s still young enough to be kittenish in nature. Which is a euphemism for “a bit stupid still.”
In the last six weeks his confidence has grown enormously and his favourite new sunning spot is the deck in front of the wheelhouse. We leave the windows open so the plants don’t make it too humid and he’s happy to hop in and out for the purposes of adventure, food or attention. Unfortunately with his new-found love of the wheelhouse we’ve discovered that Hendrik’s previous owners left us more than just duvets, thermoses and tiny frying pans.
One of the crew in Hendrik’s former life was a dog who was by all accounts very friendly and happy. But on recent evidence I think it’s fair to say he was a bit of a fleabag. The astonishing thing is that it’s been at least four years since Hendrik did summer duty and yet this whole time there’s been a ticking timebomb of itchy death waiting to spring out at us. The combination of a few warm days and a lazy cat brought them to fecund, irritating life again.
So yesterday I had to seal up all the windows, put powder down in the wheelhouse and set off nerve gas in the captain’s cabin. Bosco took being locked out surprisingly well. After an initial ten minutes of unease and a comedy leap into a closed window, he relaxed and came to investigate the salon a bit more. But the real surprise came when I saw how he gets back onto the salon roof: A flying leap at head height from the top of the collar barge next door. That’s at least 4 feet across and a foot up, into a gap between railings only about 9 inches high. Close inspection of the streaky pawprints up the side of the superstructure there reveal he’s been doing this daredevil act for a while now. All this from a cat who, a scant six weeks ago, wouldn’t even poke his nose out of the wheelhouse window.
Once the cabin was aired out, he retook his rightful position on the bed, although when the clean sheets arrived fresh from the tumble dryer (thanks Padoue!) we couldn’t resist giving him a quick blanket toss.
He wasn’t amused.
Happy Birthday Hendrik!
On Saturday we celebrated Hendrik’s 75th birthday. She rolled out of the yard on 21 June 1933 (as “Tijdgeest” then!) and we wanted to mark the occasion with a big party.
So out came the balloons, crisps & dip, beers, and barbecues and we invited some friends round to celebrate. Hendrik’s “This Is Your Life!”-style photobook was a big hit, too, and James and I opted to dress 1930s-style to mark the occasion.
It was really sweet when it was time to bring out the retro birthday cake (chocolate cake with vanilla icing and hundreds & thousands on top!) and sing Happy Birthday – it was quite windy so we had a hard time lighting the candles, but they stayed lit throughout the entire song right up until the part where we started clapping at the end… And then suddenly, with a big gust both candles blew out at once! It was like Hendrik was blowing them out himself. Awww!
As it turned out, Saturday was cause for more celebration than just the birthday… For one, we were celebrating having running water again after our new old hotness water pump died on Tuesday night. I left work for a few hours on Wednesday to run to Machine Mart, load up my credit card with a similar new pump, drag it home on a luggage dolly, and hoof it back to the office. Only to discover that the pumps were not so similar that we could just use the old fitting as-is. Cue a frantic call to Nikolaj, who saved our bacon (pump) yet again by creating a new flexible hookup that will work with either pump. The old one is still under warranty, so we’ll get the replacement impeller for it and then have that in reserve for when this new pump fails, and just cycle them out.
But it was touch and go on Saturday morning, knowing we had people coming at 3 and we needed water to flush the toilets for them and we really needed showers before everyone arrived… And voila, the pump started making pressure at 2:30!! And in retrospect, this new model is actually MUCH quieter and quicker to make pressure than the old one, so it’s not really such a bad thing.
And finally, our other cause for celebration is that James proposed on Thursday night!
We’d picked out the ring in February when we were in Dublin, but Thursday night was definitely a surprise after all that waiting! We’re looking to get married next fall at Bletchley Park, with a smaller reception in Pennsylvania shortly afterwards.
No bumping, just grinding
Open Garden Squares Weekend was a grand success! James and I were up baking until midnight on both Friday and Saturday nights, but our little bake sale raised nearly £350 for the RNLI! Not too shabby considering that all the cupcakes, cakes, cookies, and teas and coffees were going for 50p or a pound each… The visitors really seemed to take more notice of the boats this year, too, thanks to the laminated info sheets we each hung up on the walkways near our barges. It was almost like a little self-guided tour for the garden revellers!
Otherwise, we’ve been doing lots of grinding – James took over the prettification of our saloon window frames. The big windows had to be boarded up for the crossing, and so had four steel tabs welded onto each frame to keep the plywood in. In our haste to get daylight into the saloon when we finally arrived in London, they were grinded off in a less-than-expert way and resulted in some ugly, rusty tabs:
With his new-found grinding skills, James took these off entirely and repainted the frames (and a little bit of the wall, oops!) with some blue Hammerite. Much better!
And then Saturday morning we attacked the deck yet again. This time I was wearing our neighbour’s gas-mask-type full face mask and air filter, plus earplugs and gloves. Much more enjoyable, especially if you consider the amount of paint dust we’re kicking up:
We were hoping to have the deck nicely painted in time for Hendrik’s 75th birthday on Saturday*, but with a bunch of wet Saturdays in late May, it just hasn’t been realistic to finish in time. Still, we managed to do just the bright red portion (in the upper right-ish) in 3 hours on Saturday…
So I reckon one more good Saturday and we’ll have finished with the top deck grinding and we can finally roll on the new, green topcoat! (and then start on the side decks, boo!)
*If we know you and you haven’t had an invite, don’t fret. We’ve been too busy to send out proper invites and have just been using word-of-mouth. So just swing by around 3pm with some booze and something for the BBQ. And we do have a wet weather plan!
Black and blue
After living on Hendrik for over a year now, I had a “first” yesterday – I fell getting onto the boat. I was carrying a huge and heavy box (a big shipment of whole foods from Goodness Direct as part of our Apocalypse-proofing) which meant both arms were occupied and I couldn’t see my feet, and on top of this it was drizzling and we were tilted because it was low tide. I’m not sure whether my foot slipped off the gunnel or just missed it entirely, but I twisted and fell into Hendrik’s sidedeck, falling hard on the outside of my left thigh in the process. Luckily a passing workman rushed to my aid (as I was pinned down by the big box and still in a bit of shock that it had actually happened) and I’m absolutely fine, but just left with a very sore and patchily bruised vastus lateralis. Luckily it was after the race and not before, and I seemed to have gotten off a lot easier than James did when he had his fall.
In brighter news, we’ve got two big events coming up that we’re busy prepping for – this weekend is Open Garden Squares Weekend so we’re busy baking and making bunting to get everything ready for the public party atmosphere! If you’re interested in attending, please leave a comment and I’ll email you details of how you can get in to see our mooring.
And then on the 21st we’ll be celebrating Hendrik’s 75th birthday (on the day itself – we’ve got the bill of sale that shows the date!) and so are readying the BBQ and put together a photo scrapbook for our friends to look through on the day…
And while we may not be any closer to actually climbing up to the wheelhouse from the Captain’s Cabin without going outside (ladder sourcing problems!), I’m happy to report that Bosco is!
There’s always been a random steel shelf just inside the Captain’s Cabin door and underneath the wheelhouse floor (which he’s happily perched on in the above photo). James extended this with a bit of wood and now our little scaredycat is happy to jump from it up into the wheelhouse through the cabinet door. He’s even ventured out onto the back deck when we’re up there and open the door for him! Considering that he wouldn’t even go near an open door a few months ago, we’re very happy with his progress.
A stomp in the puddles
Just in case you were in any doubt that boat people are crazy… Melissa ran 10k today for the RNLI. In the pouring rain, wind, and cold!
Really, as it turned out, the rain wasn’t as big a hindrance as the sight of thousands of runners overtaking you even when you know you’re running way faster than usual! 54 minutes was the target time – but Melissa ended up finishing in 51:13, a whopping 2 minutes faster than her previous personal best!!
The Lifeboats cheering crew were great support out in front of their central London station, and James braved the wet weather to get some nice photos, too.
If you haven’t had a chance to donate to the RNLI yet, you’ve still got a few more days! Thanks very much to everyone who’s already given!
Spring flowers
Sometimes you just have to take a step back and smell the flowers. Luckily the gardener informed us we have the best view from our bedroom window than anywhere else on the moorings!
More deck grinding on the cards for the weekend…
MV Coastal Celebration
BC Ferries’ newest arrival paid a promotional stop in London on its way from Germany to Canada. I snapped a couple of photos while it was being tugged away.
Edit: and there’s a nice aerial shot for perspective here – melissa