Cruising the Cut

In which David needs to take the narrowboat out of the water to de-rust the gas locker at the bow, and has to work out how to stop his chimney from leaking.

Rust abounds again as the entire engine is taken out of David's narrowboat so that he can scrape yucky old crud out of the bilge, then treat it and repaint so that it looks half decent again. Plus the boat goes to Yelvertoft Marina to have its hull painted with bitumen, to keep the rust there at bay too.

The one where David begins his autumn 2018 narrowboat cruise along the Grand Union canal, starting at Braunston in Northamptonshire and chugging through a hateful tunnel before turning south.

There are spooky goings-on along the canal (or are there?) as David takes his narrowboat through Blisworth Tunnel - 3,000 yards long or thereabouts - and meets what seems to be a "ghost boat" as he does so...

It's all-action in this episode as the middle leg of David's narrowboat journey along the Grand Union canal is disrupted by a fallen tree; he stops to get a haircut; and he tackles a seemingly never-ending series of locks before stopping for a nice cup of tea.

David reaches the furthest point of his canal cruise, at the interestingly-named "Cowroast" - be assured, no cows were harmed in the making of this episode. Then he turns around and starts back but with a diversion for his narrowboat along the delightful Wendover Arm.

An episode in which David encounters dogs on and even in the canal, spots some new canal-building work in Milton Keynes, and has a small diesel leak. Plus he goes past the goose fields of Northamptonshire.

David's epic narrowboat odyssey along the Grand Union canal concludes as he returns to Braunston in surprisingly sunny weather for mid-October. Then he takes us back in time to May 2018, when he went to London for the annual Inland Waterways Association's "Canalway Cavalcade", which is a huge and colourful pageant of narrowboats.

As a self-confessed fair weather narrowboater, a trip along the canal in the middle of deepest, darkest winter is something of a departure for our host but, with a friend aboard, a short jaunt along part of the Oxford Canal in December was in order. There's no snow but it did feel jolly chilly.

A rather lovely video to end the season sees David firstly having a new stove pipe custom-made to crown the chimney he'd fixed in Episode One and then, on an utterly glorious day in mid-summer, he takes a trip to Welshpool to see, and experience, a horse-drawn narrowboat.