Blue Moon's trip around the UK

This is Peter. And behind him, the other two Peters. Peter, Tamara and their children Logan, Blythe and Rowan are our New Best Friends. As you have spotted there are actually two boats involved, but Jerome K Jerome’s publisher suggested that ‘Three Men in Two Boats along with One of Them’s Family’ wasn’t so snappy a title. The three of us (and the rest of the family) are at the end of what turned out to be a rather epic journey through the Crinan Canal, and we’re looking pleased with ourselves for good reason.

The Crinan Canal, for those who read Yachting Monthly less avidly than I do, is a nine-mile long canal that links the waters of the Firth of Clyde (specifically Loch Fyne) with the West Coast, thereby saving a 60-mile trip round the infamous and previously-described Mull of Kintyre. Built for trade it is now to the Clyde yachtsman what the A303 is to the Cornwall-bound Londoner: the relaxing, pretty route to a blissful summer. ‘Scotland’s prettiest shortcut’ is how it calls itself, and I have long dreamed of the day when I might join the throng heading out of the Crinan Sea Lock to the Western Isles, and to be honest I am still excited about having done it three days later.

It was (I now know) designed by James Watt and made workable by Thomas Telford, so it has all the right pedigree for a good canal; however, it seems to be having a few modern day issues.

Like all things in 2023, you have to book the fun online, which I duly did. Then I did a bit of diary planning and realised I had booked the wrong day: this week was Peter Watts’ turn to join the crew and he had to be home on Saturday, so I tried phoning the canal office to change the booking. After three days of phoning, someone with a most un-Scottish South African accent answered the phone. “Blue Moon?” he said. “I was just about to phone you.” How convenient. “We have some emergency work and you can’t come through on Thursday, it’ll have to be Wednesday. You won’t be able to go past Lock 9, you will have to have your keel up, and we may not be able to get you to Crinan until Friday”. Given that I had just shelled out £140 for what was supposed to be the prettiest shortcut of a lifetime, this was already looking like poor value. But I wasn’t going to subject Peter (whose legendary sailing skills were honed on the gravel pits of Kent) to the possibility of Mull of Kintyre-sized waves, so I meekly nodded down the phone.

Bearing in mind that Peter (W this is, do keep up, we don’t know third Peter’s surname so he will just be Peter) also hasn’t done much sailing recently and certainly not in anything bigger than a Squib (but on the Medway, so we forgive him), I also decided to book a Canal Pilot to help with the locks. This turned out to be a small amount of money very well spent, as Joe the Pilot has been doing it for 20 years and knows everything and everyone. He also gives his takings to charity, bless him. He confirmed in almost as many words that the canal was, as it were, up the canal without a paddle: there had been so little rain the reservoirs were way down and on top of that two lock gates were coming apart and leaking even more water. Exactly how and when they were going to fix them was something of a moveable feast as they kept changing their minds. He begged us to get there as early as we could so that he could badger our way in through the restrictions. I promised to phone him in the run-up to the day and every time I did the situation had changed – they were going to close on Wednesday until Friday, no, now it was Thursday to Saturday, no, now Wednesday half day but we might get stuck at Lock 10, and so on.

He also mentioned that he had another booking with a man also called Peter, which seemed to please him a lot although it sounded potentially confusing to me. I once raced the Dragon with two crew called Tim who spent the whole weekend either falling over each other to trim the sheet I’d mentioned or sitting waiting for the other one to do it.

Peter and I duly arrived at Ardrossan (less said the better) and headed off for a gentle sail around the Kyles of Bute to spend the night at Tarbet in Loch Fyne which looked lovely. The Kyles of Bute are lovelier and with all day at hand we treated ourselves to a lunch stop. Joe had left a message to say Wednesday (the next day) was looking good, so we relaxed.

Fatal mistake. Lunch over we wafted out into mobile signal range to pick up a message from Joe – they were threatening not to let anyone in at all, so he insisted that we went to the locks at Ardrishaig at once so we could be beating down their door at 0830 when it opened. So it was another load of diesel burned as we hurried to a village considerably less beautiful than Tarbet for the night.

Here we met Joe, who introduced himself as ‘Grumpy Joe’ since he spent his life complaining to the canal staff. He also took one look at the transom and said – first time this has happened – “Medway Yacht Club, eh?”. “Yes,” we both replied, delighted to see my home club and Peter’s home county recognised. “Hrrmph”, he grumped, eponymously. “Bad lot. I once had a terrible time with a flotilla from the Medway Yacht Club.” This shocked us both – first that a whole flotilla had made it from the Medway, also that they had inflicted a terrible time on Joe, who for all his grumpy persona was clearly a delightful, mild yachtsman. So mild he wouldn’t be drawn on the nature of the terrible time, but it appeared to involve varying opinions about how to navigate the canal, voiced at high volume by people from the other side of the country. Then Peter and co arrived and said hello. They also looked at the (other side of) the transom and said “Itchenor Sailing Club eh?”. We feared the worst, and it was. “Logan here has been down to Hayling for the Oppies.” This is a bit like telling a proud Man of Kent that you have been to Essex and liked it, but since they were Scottish I forgave them and in the interests of harmony I bit my tongue. In the light of new news from Joe that they might not let us into the canal until lunchtime, which would inevitably mean not making it through and being stuck in some construction site or other for days on end, we agreed to reconvene with our best aggrieved-fee-paying-customer faces on at 0825 next morning. We settled down to watch a tribe of local children hurling themselves into the empty lock, and then the empty loch (geddit?) as these hardy Scots do.

0830 on the dot we were met by the canal boss I had spoken with earlier. All smiles, he informed us that we couldn’t possibly lock in until 1230, half tide, or when the sluices covered, whichever came later. He also changed his mind a bit about whether we would make it past lock 9 or 10, or indeed whether the canal would be closed the next day or not. Then he disappeared, to be replaced by the lock keepers: two girls who appeared to be in the first week or two of their summer jobs, who we swore had been jumping into the lock the night before, or possibly their slightly older sisters.

Given that the locks are huge, cross busy roads and handle a lot of yachts a lot bigger than mine, crewed by anxious and precious sailors from uncouth places like the Medway YC, we had assumed we would be dealing with gnarled old men who had spent a lifetime on the canal, but no: the entire staff seemed to be students, which seemed an odd recruitment strategy and so it proved. The girls on the sea lock were polite and solicitous, but sadly for the boss man they were open to being persuaded by all and sundry. Luckily for us, Joe looked the part, and probably knew their families, so in short order 1230 had become 1130, and by 1115 we were in. Then there was a delay and a debate about how many boats could fit in the lock, and they tried a third. This worked on the first lock, but not the second, when some nerves and fenders became frayed. They called the boss, and we were treated to half an hour of jiggery-pokery while they tried to fit a 12 metre boat into a 10 metre space. Joe had some more words, the boss was called away (perhaps an urgent phone call from a mystery grumpy person), the third boat was removed and we were on our way up. There appeared to be some argument between the lock keepers about whose turn it was to press the buttons, but Joe appeared to step in and no-one was hurt.

We were, however, now at least an hour behind schedule, and it turned out that further up the canal the locks weren’t ready. At this point, up stepped young Logan and Blythe. A few words of instruction from Joe and they were up the ladders before you could say ‘upper paddle sluice’, taking lines, winding sluices, opening and closing gates, and freeing Joe up to cycle on ahead to do his thing. Peter W began to feel the pressure, so I was left doing lines on my own while he joined in the fun. And so it was that, in spite of various bridges needing to be swung by a wide range of other canal girls, we somehow managed to make it through the two flights of locks up and down the summit before any of their gates fell off. The sun was out, all the girls were as friendly and cheerful as you would expect when the novelty of a fabulous summer job hasn’t worn off yet, and two of the Peters relaxed into steering slowly in and out of locks while their children/friends did all the hard work.

Then the fly hit the sunny ointment. A lock keeper who had seen us through the last of the downwards locks was clearly full time and knew his locking onions: he’d been told we could go no further than the next bridge which was in the middle of nowhere, since it was 5pm and canal closing time. This was when Peter played the blinder of the day: we couldn’t hear exactly what passed between him and Canal HQ but we think it involved the amount charged, the family holiday booked, the ice creams that had been promised at the other end and perhaps even some compromising photographs. Whatever it was, it worked. Suddenly it was all good: bridges opened, and bridge-keepers waved us through wreathed in smiles while we thanked them profusely while crossing our fingers. We even managed to make it down a piece of canal so narrow it would challenge any dinghy sailor, but not our Peter:

We made it to the Crinan basin but sadly the ice cream shop had shut. We did manage to persuade the people at the hotel, much against their will, to sell us some beer and oysters, so one of the crews was happy. And it was the most quiet, silent and utterly beautiful place to spend Midsummer’s Eve, watching the sun set across Jura, Scarba, and a load of other rocky islands that I have only ever dreamt of visiting, laid out before us like a smorgasbord that made a couple of Kentish sailors drool. The not-Kentish Peter grew up sailing these waters with his parents, but I am feeling like a kid in a toy shop, I want to leave now and visit them all. But first we have to wait for another set of girls to arrive and open the lock…

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