So far I’ve only been in possession of Ordu for about 3 weeks, but an awful lot has happened.  I knew that the nautical world had its own way of working, but I didn’t think that I’d become immersed in it so quickly. Everything I’ve told you so far happened some years ago now and I’m sufficiently scarred by the experience that I don’t see it objectively, so I thought I’d piece together the timeline from the invoices I received to judge whether or not I’m being unfair to Linden Lewis (LL):

• 04/01/2006: Ordu arrives at Shepperton
• 20/01/2006: I purchase a Parsons gearbox from Will Carter in Southampton
• 24/01/2006: LL informs me that my Parsons gearbox will not fit
• 27/01/2006: I purchase a Borg Warner gearbox from D-Ray marine in Bournemouth
• 01/02/2006: LL provides a quote for removing the existing Paragon gearbox and installing the new Borg Warner gearbox
• 23/02/2006: LL installs the Borg Warner gearbox and finds it doesn’t fit.  Hang on, there’s 3 weeks between quoting for the work and actually doing it.  Should I be worried about that?  No, LL is a professional outfit, I’m sure it was an anomoly.
• 27/02/2006: LL provides a quote for raising the prop shaft by 2 inches.  4 days later – That’s more like it.  We’re back on track
• 22/03/2006: A brand new ZF gearbox is delivered to LL at Shepperton.  A month has gone by but that is my fault.  This time, I wanted to be sure I was doing the right thing
• 05/07/2006: Ordu arrives in the marina of my choice having been transported by road from Shepperton

Looking at this list you might be bemused as to why I am so exasperated by LL.  The reason that Ordu arrived in the marina of my choice when she did was that I had become so fed up with chasing Nigel at LL to find out when my ZF gearbox would be fitted that I had decided to take the matter into my own hands.  Every time I called I was presented with another  ‘reason’ why the gearbox had not yet been fitted.  To be fair to Nigel, I could tell from his responses that he wasn’t entirely happy about the situation himself.  Some time towards the end of June – 3 months after it had been delivered – LL finally fitted the gearbox and I asked for an estimate of the bill I had run up so far.  The result shocked me to the core.

Somehow, the simple act of fitting a gearbox had caused me to run up a bill of over £4,000.  Yes, I said £4,000.  That doesn’t include the marina’s mooring fees!  Not only had I apparently dropped to the bottom of LL’s maintenance list but I was paying a king’s ransom for the privelege.  To add insult to injury, they hadn’t even finished the job.  They couldn’t balance the prop shaft because they couldn’t start the engine, and they couldn’t work out why.  I went straight to Shepperton (so as not to run up any more bills) with my excellent guide to marine electronics and worked out for myself in half an hour that the reason the engine wouldn’t start was because the ignition ground return was missing (this is the wire that completes the circuit which operates the solenoid – the solenoid, in turn, connects the batteries to the starter motor).  Why this cable was missing is another story which, sadly, I do not know.  However, despite having no experience in marine electronics whatsoever I had diagnosed the problem in 30 minutes.  Why, then, could LL not work it out when they were experts?

The Neighbours

Whether it’s true or not, the answer seemed pretty clear to me – they didn’t care.  If that’s how I felt then it was time to get the hell out of there.  We found the telephone number of our marina of choice and made a call.  We wanted to know if we could put her on hard standing.  Fortunately, we were pretty confident that we would be able to because we had called in January to ask the same question (ah, the beauty of innocence) and had been told that spaces were available.  This is why, in an earlier post, I stated that in order to get a mooring you have to have a boat.  We were prepared to keep moving Ordu until we found a permanent mooring (which, fortunately, we didn’t have to do) but we took the risk of buying her without a mooring arranged.  Whereas, with no boat, we were told the waiting list was 20 years when we had a boat we were told that hard standing was immediately available.  True, hard standing is not a permanent mooring but we figured that we could get to that if we could just get a foot in the door.

There was a place available for us in our destination of choice and we took it immediately.  I’m not accusing anybody of anything here -  LL may have acted completely professionally in all their dealings with me and probably had very good reasons for doing what they did.  All I can say for sure is that they did a poor job of communicating this to me and justifying the enormous bill I had to pay.  In my humble opinion if you want happy customers it would be a good idea not to continually feed them excuses as to why you haven’t yet done what they asked then charge them a fortune when you finally get around to it.  But then again, what do I know?

Background, Gearbox

There wasn’t anything intrinsically wrong with the gearbox I bought.  In fact, it had only just been overhauled by West Point Marine and so was in very good condition.  No, the problem with the gearbox was the engine.  More specifically, the problem with the gearbox was that, in order to fit it, the engine would have to be raised to a level which would leave it sticking through the wheelhouse floor.  The ‘drop down’ (the vertical distance between the input shaft from the engine and the drive shaft to the propeller) was too big.  This is my fault, precipitated by Mistake #2 (parking Ordu so far away that I couldn’t easily check things like this – see a previous post).

Bugger!  I went back to boats and outboards and looked through the adverts to see if I could find anyone who might be able to help me.  I ended up contacting Seahorse Power as they are specialists in Ford marine parts.  They told me that my old Parsons gearbox was an in-line gearbox (i.e. the input shaft from the engine and the output to the drive shaft are co-axial) and that there are 2 suitable replacements: the Borg Warner, or the PRM750CB. They offered to sell me new versions of either of these gearboxes for a mere £2,300.00 (plus VAT, of course) – how nice of them.  Alternatively, they might be able to pick up reconditioned ones for about £1,400.00.  Despite evidence to the contrary I am starting to learn something, which is that you never buy from a specialist unless you have to (thank god for the internet).

Borg Warner Velvet Drive gearbox

So, it was back to boats and outboards.  I have to admit that, without knowing any other distinguishing features, the name of the Borg Warner sold it to me (the model I required is called a ‘velvet drive’).  Marketing works, it seems.  That, and the fact that a search on the internet showed that Borg Warner gearboxes are actually quite good.  Anyway, I ended up buying a second gearbox from a very nice, helpful man called Darren Ray of D-Ray marine in Bournemouth, for £650.00.  OK, so two weeks after buying one gearbox I’ve bought another one.  But I’ve got professional advice on this one so it can’t go wrong, right?

I call Nigel and tell him that I’ll be bring over another gearbox to replace the first one that he couldn’t fit because it would mean bringing the engine through the floor of the wheelhouse.  I take the Borg Warner over and wait excitedly for the call that tells me my boat is ready.  Two weeks later I get a call, but it is not the one I was hoping for!  Nigel tells me that his engineers have removed the old gearbox and fitted the new Borg Warner only to find that it doesn’t line up with the prop shaft – the output from the gearbox was about 2 inches too high.  In order to make it line up with the prop shaft the engine would have to be dropped through the hull.  But hang on a second, I received advice from experts who told me I needed an in-line gearbox, so I got an in-line gearbox.  What the…?  Nigel insisted that the gearbox didn’t fit but suggested that we raise the prop shaft so that it could attach to the gearbox.  Yes, you read that right – he was proposing cutting Ordu open and lifting the whole prop shaft by a couple of inches to solve an alignment problem!!

At this point, I’m slightly in shell-shock so I ask him to price the work up.  Nigel calls me up a couple of days later to say that he’s costed the work (£1443.25, if you’re interested) but that there is another problem.  In looking at what is involved in raising the prop shaft they have uncovered a rotten beam under the rear deck.  He’s worried about what else they might uncover during the operation.  He’s not the only one!  I rush over to Shepperton and take a look.  He’s right, there is a rotten wooden beam under the rear deck but I can’t worry about this too much right now (although this will rear its ugly head later in my story).  OK, so I’ve bought a boat with a broken gearbox which is moored 25 miles away in the most expensive marina in the universe, I have two new gearboxes neither of which fit, I have rotten beams supporting the rear deck and the engineers want to cut open my boat and raise the prop shaft by two inches.

The rotten beam under the rear deck

A lesser man would have panicked.  Fortunately, I’m made of sterner stuff.  As soon as Nigel mentioned raising the prop shaft I knew it was a bad idea, but I needed time to think.  Having thought, I realised that the only sensible thing to do was to buy the right gearbox. At least I now knew that I needed a drop-down of about 2 inches.  I searched the internet and found out that what I needed was a ZF Hurth, so I bought a ZF 15M from Golden Arrow Marine in Southampton for £785.00 and had it delivered directly to Shepperton for immediate fitting.

Of course, when I say ‘immediate’ I am referring to conditions in the space-time continuum occupied by all things nautical which, as you will know, does not obey the rules we have come to rely upon in the ‘real’ world.  To make things worse, Mistake #2 had led me to moor Ordu at an unfortunate confluence of the ‘nautical’ space-time continuum and the ‘wealthy owner’ continuum with Ordu apparently forming a direct worm-hole between the two.  This appeared to mean that because I owned neither a plastic gin palace nor half of Surrey (unlike, it appears, a significant number of the other berth-holders at Shepperton) I failed to register significantly on the consciousness of the LL operatives occupying both these continuums.

I lurched through this distant reality like some kind of telephonic ghost, moaning and groaning, with the staff at Shepperton seeming to be sufficieltly aware of my presence to register some annoyance at the noise, but not enough to want to perform an exorcism and get rid of me for good by doing the work I wanted to pay them for.  The abortive gearbox replacement took place at the end of January 2006 but by the time I had bought the third (and final) gearbox it would appear that the oligarchs had awoken from hibernation and, by requiring their vessels to be prepared for the forthcoming boating season, had sent me squarely to the bottom of the maintenance ‘waiting’ list (I put this in inverted commas since it would appear that only some of us needed to wait at all – but, then again, maybe I am just jealous or confused).

Background, Borg Warner, Gearbox, Hurth, Velvet Drive, ZF

Ordu in Shepperton

I arranged with Molly for her to deliver Ordu to Shepperton in January 2006.  Once she was there I’d look for a gearbox and then get Linden Lewis to fit it.  Since Ordu didn’t have a functioning gearbox it was necessary to get her towed to Shepperton from Thames Ditton, and Molly arranged for one of her ‘boating’ friends to make the delivery.  Ordu arrived a day later than arranged, sparking a considerable degree of panic from me, but at last she was there.  Of course, I went to Shepperton as fast as the train could carry me and I tracked her down, only to find that Molly’s friend had not only delivered her but had decided to use her as a floating rubbish dump.  It looked like he had literally emptied his dustbin onto her rear deck.  I had to remove 6 full bin liners of assorted household junk (including several unwrapped, used, nappies – thank you so much Molly’s friend).  Once I had – literally – cleared the crap away I had time to gaze on her proudly, which is when I noticed that ‘friend’ had managed to bend the pullpit out of shape during her passage from Thames Ditton.

Whatever, she was ours now.  The next thing to do was find a gearbox and get LL to fit it.  Simple, right? I’m guessing that you have some idea by now of where I might be going with this?  Molly had told me that the engine was a Ford 4D, pre 1955, and that the gearbox was a Paragon with a 2:1 ratio.  The gearbox information was correct and the engine is a Ford 4D, but not pre 1955 (more details about the engine will appear in future posts).  I’m a mechanical engineer by training, but I haven’t had a car for many years and being trained as a mechanical engineer is very different from being a mechanic.  I had some idea of what I was looking for, but with the boat 25 miles away it was pretty difficult to easily check up on details.  Besides which, at this point I wasn’t sure which details I was supposed to be checking.

My new Parsons gearbox

The first place to look was boats and outboards and it didn’t let me down.  Someone near Southampton was selling a Parson’s gearbox with a bell housing that fitted a Ford engine.  This gearbox had a 2:1 ratio and was available immediately for collection for £600.  I was pretty much shooting in the dark, but the point of getting Ordu in the first place was to learn so I went for it.  Selena and I travelled down to pick up the gearbox on Saturday morning and drove back to meet friends at Shepperton who helped me unload it in the afternoon (it weighed a ridiculous amount).

With the help of my friends we transferred the gearbox to a trolley and left it there for the engineers at Linden Lewis to fit.  I met with their new customer service manager who, for the sake of this story, I’ll call Nigel.  Nigel had just joined LL and was very helpful and courteous (which is nice, as I spent a lot of time communicating with Nigel over the next six months).  Now, as I’ve already said, I’m not a mechanic.  If I were, I wouldn’t have made Mistake #4 and bought the wrong gearbox.

Background, Gearbox, Paragon, Parsons

OK, so we’ve bought Ordu.  She’s in west London, and we live in east London.  Now we need to find a place to keep her and a means of getting her there, because her gearbox is broken and she can’t move without being towed.  I ask the woman I’ve bought her from if she will organise the replacement of the gearbox (for which I will pay her).  This is Mistake #1.

We bought Ordu in December 2005 and spent Xmas and New Year excitedly planning how we were going to get her from Thames Ditton to east London.  This meant choosing whether we would take her onto the Grand Union Canal at Brentford and then across London via the Regents Canal, or whether we should just go for it – wait for the right tide and take her down the Thames.  Either option would be scary but exhilarating.

The original (broken!) Paragon gearbox

So, what would these two options involve?  Well, taking her via the Regents Canal would mean a trip of several days as there are quite a few locks to be negotiated, but it would be safe.  In my excitement at the thought of getting Ordu I had already visited the marina and bought a windlass for opening manual locks, and a British Waterways key for operating electric locks (I can’t remember how much they cost exactly, but it was of the order of £10).  Most marinas sell these items, or can get them for you if you ask. I’d also requested a copy of the Thames Tideway Guide so that I could see what travelling down the Thames would involve. All we had to do now was plan our trip and wait for Maggie (the previous owner) to let me know when she’d replaced the gearbox.

So we waited.  And we waited.  And we waited some more.  Looking back, I can laugh knowingly at the naive faith in human nature that led me to assume that Maggie had any intention whatsoever of trying to replace the gearbox.  Mistake #2 would have been letting her do it, but fortunately we managed to avoid that by getting really fed up with the delay and telling her to forget the whole gearbox thing.  Don’t worry though, the real Mistake #2 is not far away.  In my frustration with the situation (which was really of my own making – what was I doing buying a boat with a broken gearbox?) I decided to take affirmative action.  This meant finding somewhere to put Ordu while I managed the replacement of the gearbox myself.

I went to the internet and searched for suitable marinas in west London to serve as a temporary home for Ordu while the gearbox was changed, and while we looked for a permanent mooring.  Mistakes #2 & #3 came in quick succession as a result of this decision. Mistake #2 was choosing a marina that was some 20 miles away from my home.  This meant that my access to Ordu to check on anything at all was ridiculously limited (I don’t have a car – who needs a car in London?).

Mistake #2 compounded and amplified the effect of Mistake #3, which was choosing Shepperton Marina as her temporary home.  Shepperton is a lovely marina, and it is also home to the financial black hole that is Linden Lewis Marine.  Unfortunately I was both ignorant and panicked, what with a new boat and nowhere to put her, so I took what seemed like the best course of action.

Background, Gearbox, Ordu

Originally, the idea was to look for, buy and move onto a Dutch Barge.  After having looked at some barges and spoken to their owners it seemed that the ideal course of action was actually to get a barge built to order.  Neither of us wants to live on a floating museum, so the idea of buying an original Dutch Barge and renovating it to its former glory has never appealed.  Quite the opposite, in fact.  I, more than Selena, am very keen on the idea of building a modern boat that uses the most appropriate technology to create a new kind of living space.  Plus, converting an existing boat that was designed for carrying freight means that there are unwanted bulkheads and anchor wells in all the wrong places.  With a new build there is less necessity for compromise.

Whilst it is all very well for me to extoll the virtues of modern boats and materials there remains a single, seemingly insurmountable problem – where will we keep the bloody thing?  We live in east London, and want to continue living there.  We had already chosen Springfield Marina as the destination of choice, and we knew full well that there was no chance of turning up there with a 70ft boat and asking for a place to stay.  So, we thought, why not buy a smaller boat, one that we can get lots of use out of and which can familiarise us with boats and their ways (and they do have their own ways!).

The best way to get a boat is to buy one that is already on a mooring so we started looking for a barge (a narrowboat, that is), 30-40ft long, for sale in the marina.  We also looked elsewhere since it was much more likely that we would find something we wanted that didn’t come with a mooring – we could worry about that when the time came.  The best place to look for boats is on the internet, with Apollo Duck and Boats and Outboards being the best sites.  Personally, and in contrast to my opening statements about new boats, I wanted to get something classic.  Something, that is, with a bit of character and not some plastic monstrosity.  I was also looking for other boats besides narrowboats.

In December of 2005 I saw this advert on Apollo Duck: “27ft/8ft converted WW2 Dutch Patrol Boat (1941). Steel Hull. Double Bedroom, incredible use of space with decent storage. Fully equipped bathroom with shower/sink/toilet. Spacious wheelhouse/kitchen. Beautiful carpentry. No other boat like this on the Thames. Reluctant sale after very happy time living aboard due to pregnancy.”

Hmmm….. I thought, that sounds more like it.  I went to see the boat in Kingston.  ‘Ordu’ was moored behind Marks & Spencer for the day, and I loved her as soon as I saw her.  I now committed the cardinal sin of buying boats – I wanted to get it without having a survey done.  And this in spite of the fact that I knew that the gearbox needed replacing and that the boat didn’t have a safety certificate (or, therefore, insurance)! Well, I just felt that it was right and that it was an adventure and that the best thing to do was to go with it and have some fun.

Anyway, Selena came to visit the next weekend and she fell in love with her too.  We brought a chequebook with us so that we could put a deposit on her immediately, which we did.  Rather than being moored in central Kingston, this time she was moored at the bottom of the garden of an abandoned house in Thames Ditton along with a motley collection of narrowboats.  This was not a good sign, but we went with it anyway.  The deposit was given on condition that the current owner replaced the gearbox for us.  We tentatively arranged to pick the boat up on Boxing Day.

When we got home we looked up ‘Ordu’ on Google.  We found this advert from the previous owner: “1927 Dutch steel cruiser,`ORDU’, really lovley little craft, 15,000 pound overhaul 2 years ago, change of situation means quick sale required, this little boat is a huge bargain. Shower room, fridge, electric central heating, solid fuel stove, etc.”

She now appeared to have been built in 1927 (the correct date, as we subsequently discovered).  We also found that we were paying somewhat more than the current owner had paid, but since we were happy with that price we couldn’t complain.  We had, after all, found ourselves a boat!

Background, Ordu

Selena and I bought ‘Ordu’ in December 2005.  We had been thinking about living on a Dutch Barge for several years in a fairly abstract sort of way, but during the course of 2005 we started getting serious.  We scoured the rivers and canals of east London to see what sort of residential moorings were available and how we could get hold of one.  Anyone who has ever undertaken this quest will tell you at the start that it is a lost cause, but I guess we just had to see for ourselves.  Well, we saw. There are plenty of tiny moorings on the Regents Canal but the chances of actually getting a Dutch Barge that far up the canal are slim (no pun intended!), let alone the chances of actually securing a mooring there.

There are plenty of moorings on the Thames but very few of them are residential. Boat people will tell you not to worry about whether they are residential or not  because British Waterways turn a blind eye, but they have started cracking down on unofficial residential moorings and are turning people away for staying where they shouldn’t.

Neither Selena nor I want the uncertainty of being kicked off our unofficial residential mooring with nowhere to go and a 70ft boat to house, so we looked at the ‘official’ residential marinas.  These are Poplar Dock Marina on the Isle of Dogs and Limehouse Marina in Wapping (at this point you might be asking why we haven’t considered the Thames in West London – the answer is that we live in, work in and like east London). Having looked at these marinas we crossed Poplar Dock off the list immediately, even though we looked at several barges there that were for sale (have you ever been to Poplar? Perhaps a more pertinent question is would you ever go back?).  We loved Limehouse, but the chances of getting a mooring there are roughly the same as of me being asked to captain the England football team.

What, then, were we to do?  There is a marina in east London that just happens to be 25 minutes walk from our flat.  In the summer we spent most of our time in park opposite and we had fallen in love with the marina years ago, so it made perfect sense to look for a mooring there.  Incidentally, I’m not going to tell you exactly where it is because one of the best things about it is that very few people know about it (although, given that no-one is likely to read this perhaps this isn’t too much of a problem)

OK, so now we have decided where we want to put our boat how do we go about getting a mooring?  Um… we don’t!  When we asked at the marina office about putting ourselves on the waiting list we were cheerfully told that the waiting list had been scrapped some time ago when it had reached a wait of 20 years!  This, unfortunately, is the problem with all residential moorings in London.  There are so many people like us who want a boat that once someone gets a mooring they don’t tend to part with it.  Even if they are getting rid of a mooring, the chances of it being advertised outside of the marina are miniscule. The only way you can get into the marina to hear about such opportunities, however, is to have a boat there because the marina is only accessible to berth holders.  Hmmm, catch 22.

It seemed as though there were only two options: buy a boat that is already on a mooring in the marina of your choice and risk having to wait years, or maybe even decades, until that boat comes up for sale (and then have to bid against several other hungry potential boat owners for the privilege) or buy a boat that you like and wait until a mooring becomes available.  The second option is risky, because you may spend years moving the boat every two weeks (you can’t stay longer than 14 days on a temporary mooring) until a mooring becomes available.  That is the option we took, though, and it paid off as we now have a permanent mooring  just where we wanted it.

Background, Ordu