Don't Bang 'Em About - Traditional Single Handed Lock Technique

Working up the Napton Flight, working single handed with an unloaded boat. It's all a bit tricky especially when filming single handed to! Some bumps, but gives you an idea of the process I hope. See 'more' for extra information:

The boat is a full length GU boat, that means 71.5 feet not including the rudder. This makes it a tight fit on some canals and there fore the fender needs to be removed. It’s scary coming down a lock and seeing the cill appear inches from the rudder but the boat never gets caught if kept forwards. Many boats have been sunk by getting the rudder trapped in the bottom gates, so this is the safest way to get an historic boat through a lock like this.

Don’t think I haven’t tried other ways, but the boat bangs about if not left in forward on the cill and blows the gates open again if you don’t lift a ground paddle before closing the bottom gates.

I did miss judge the timing of raising the ground paddles so the boat hit harder than it should - but considering I was filming it (remember the camera is sat on the footboard of the top gate) I don’t think I did so bad.

The paddles were let down not dropped being slowed by hand on the spindle. Far better than having a windless jump off and have them drop straight down as I so often see others doing. The gates are designed to have the boat against them, having extra fendering on them for this purpose.

Sometimes you just need to get somewhere within a time period and as you can see I was happily keeping up with the two handed boat ahead.