Messing About on the River

Ann and I spent our honeymoon on a hired boat on the River Thames. That led to a number of further hire boat holidays and eventually, we bought our own:

This is "Swanmore", built in 1997 and owned by us for a couple of years until we outgrew it.
Swanmore was replaced by "Vigornia", a 65 foot narrowboat, cheaply built with some expensive fittings. Very curious, because the important bits like the wiring and the mechanicals had all been skimped on, but the taps were gold plated. We bought her as a "design study as we worked towards the "ultimate" boat, which was to turn up a few years later.

Vigornia did us well for a few years and we had many enjoyable holidays. Here she is, tied up in Oxford close to Osney Bridge. We'd been up the river as far as was possible to go to Lechlade. Actually, that isn't quite true as we went a bit further, couldn't turn and so reversed until we got to a point where we thought we could turn. Well, we couldn't and became stuck hard agroud front and back until rescued some hours later by the Environment Agency in a powerful tug. Well, these things happen. We sneaked out early the next morning, to be greeted by a lock keeper enquiring if we knew why the flow of water might have slowed the previous evening...

And finally, we come to the ultimate boat "Jasmine". Just over 70 feet long and built for long term cruising or as a live aboard.
We weren't using her enough due to all the other interests, so in the end we took the decision to sell her. Boats are expensive toys...  The best feature of this boat was the engine - a vintage Russell Newbery slow running proper boat engine. Idle speed, approx 60 rpm and flat out at 700 rpm. They are full of character, but not by any means an install and forget option as they require a lot of tender loving care to keep them running properly. We'd just about got ours running to perfection when we sold. Here's the engine, below: