Impellered

Banbury to Twyford Wharf, 2.75 miles, 1 lock

Wonderful weather this morning and I was up and ready to go by 10. It was a bit strange leaving Banbury and I've noticed that I get this feeling whenever I leave somewhere I've been a few days. The other feeling I get is one of panic and that was definitely present this morning. Thinking about it, I can only assume that it is once again due to me setting targets for myself, in this case to get to Oxford by the end of Saturday. That was the plan yesterday, except that I lost the day to boat problems, shopping, chores and stabbing myself (looking much better today, thank you). Today was going to be different.

My biggest worry was the large number of lift bridges on this stretch of canal. A couple of people have told me that they're usually 'up' and I have nothing to worry about, however my experiences with movable bridges so far haven't been great and I'm still a bit unnerved by yesterday's. As it happens, they were all raised and I whizzed through. In fact my biggest problem of the morning was the brightness of the sun, which was shining directly in my eyes most of the time.

Eventually I got to a lift-bridge that appeared to be down, except that something was wrong with the picture. It turned out that this was the first lock and the 'something wrong' were people with windlasses. There was a boat coming up and another behind it, so both crews took complete control of the lock and all I had to do was look after Oothoon. It all went well, which is good because it looked like quite a deep lock to me, although it turns out it's a baby at 9'6 (2.9m)—the next lock is 10'8 (3.25m) and there's Somerton Deep to come, which is 12 foot! (3.7m)

After leaving the lock I noticed that the temperature gauge was registering 80° and as I watched it jumped to 90°. Not long afterwards, smoke started to emerge from the engine area and I pulled over. I experimented with leaving the engine running, which brought down the temperature a little, but not enough to stop the smoke; and stopping the engine, which made the temperature go up considerably due to the lack of cooling water. Once the temperature was at a safe level, I unscrewed the cap on the header tank and looked inside. There appeared to be water there, but I knew from my DeLorean days that this is misleading. I'd taken the trouble to two-thirds fill my 25 litre water carrier and I slowly glugged it into the top of the engine, with it overflowing just before I ran out. Having filled the tank, I cheerfully unmoored and set off down the canal again, only to watch the temperature needle rise to 60°, 70°, 80° and 90°. After the appearance of smoke I pulled over—this time a little way before bridge 177 between King's Sutton and Adderbury (Twyford Wharf).

Leaving the engine running, I took the covers off and looked for leaks. Sure enough, the two grease nipples on the auxiliary water pump, whose impeller I'd had replaced back in Welford, had water dripping from them. I stopped the engine and waited for it to cool, then removed the brass caps on the nipples and stuffed them with grease. I also topped up the water just in case and was pleased to see that it didn't need much. I started the engine and checked for leaks, and on finding none I again set off.

This time I really didn't get far—just under the bridge and round the corner in fact—before the temperature was up in the 70's. I pulled over again and stopped the engine. A quick check under the covers showed that nothing was dripping and at that point I decided I was out of my depth and called RCR. They'd called me sometime earlier in the week when I'd had no mobile reception, to check whether I was happy with the call-out I'd had on the way to Coventry when I'd run out of diesel and I'd called them back yesterday and upgraded to Gold membership, so I didn't feel anything like as nervous as I would have if this had been my second call-out of the seven allowed by Silver membership.

RCR said that someone would be with me between 4 and 4:30, so I let the engine cool a bit more, then decided I'd use the 'temperature window' to get Oothoon back to bridge 177—this being the last road bridge for several miles. With fingers crossed and not a little trepidation, I put her into reverse and pulled away from the bank. Narrowboats were never designed to go backwards and it really shows in their handling, which is almost, but not quite, non-existent. By pushing the tiller towards the left (as you look off the back of the boat) you can kind-of vaguely move to the right and vice-versa, but it isn't exactly steering and it's the front of the boat that you need to keep an eye on. I was fairly happy that nothing would be coming, since the two boats going through the lock were the only other moving boats I'd seen all day, however just as I came around the bend—tacked round the bend is probably a more appropriate description—there was another boat coming under the bridge. I was headed for the bank at that point anyway, so just kept going, doing a little puff of forward thrust before hitting it to make the front turn in. The result was a wonderfully graceful 'reverse into a parking spot' manoeuvre that left me adjacent to the bank so they could pass. Once they were gone, it was a bit more effort to get under the bridge backwards, but again my line was good and I sailed through and parked perfectly.

Jim, the RCR man, was at the boat bang on 4:30 and I explained what I'd done today and also the troubled history of the auxiliary water pump and the impeller. After running up the engine and feeling various pipes, he concluded that one side of the pump was hot and the other merely warm—just like in Welford. Fortunately I'd had the foresight to get another impeller in the chandlery at Rose Narrowboats in Brinklow last week, so if it was the impeller then I was ready. After a quick call to a 'Jabsco Expert' and a struggle, Jim got the cover off the pump and where there should have been an impeller, there was...a few bits of rubber. It had pretty much disintegrated. That would explain the lack of cooling then. Although Jabsco pumps weren't Jim's area of expertise, I'd listened carefully to what Dave had said when he'd fitted the replacement impeller in Welford, so knew the trick for getting the belt off the pulley and how you have to take the pulley off to push the shaft through to get the locking key so you can fit the new impeller. It was a bit of effort, because you need to lean over the engine to get to the pump and there's the ever present danger of the shark-infested* bilge for you to drop things in, but Jim managed it and with a few minutes to go before sunset, everything was back together and we started the engine.

After Dave replaced the impeller, the engine had a tendency to run all day at about 50°; after fitting this new one, we couldn't get a temperature to register on the gauge at all. In the end we left it a while, running at a decent amount of revs and got a small needle deflection, which told us what we needed to know. I filled in the paperwork and Jim headed off to the first of the two jobs still left for him to do today. Still unanswered is what happened to the impeller to cause it to disintegrate and whether it would affect this one too?

As the engine hadn't run much today, I left it running to charge the batteries and to see what would happen temperature-wise. I stopped it at 8pm and it was up to 60°, which I can live with. It might be less than that when the boat is moving, as there'll be a better cooling effect from the moving water outside the keel tank.

Dinner was pasta with pesto and crayfish tails. I'd bought a tub of these in the Tesco in Rugby and they looked very nice. Worst case, I figured that I could buy some rocket and make an ersatz M&S sandwich. Feeling that I really needed some comfort food, I had a tin of rice pudding afterwards. It was nice at the time, but I'm woozy now with the sugar. I'm hoping that I'll make some progress tomorrow, but really I'm worried about the water pump. As I don't know what caused its demise, I don't know that it won't happen again, except I do know that I don't have a spare impeller. I really don't want it to go wrong on the Thames, especially on the tidal bit from Teddington to Brentford. I'm beginning to think that maybe I should have gone down the Grand Union after all, even if it would mean going through Blisworth tunnel again.

* I'm joking—there aren't really sharks in my bilge.