In the eighties, we hired several times from Kate Boats Warwick, as they were then, under Eric Simmonds. He'd not long taken over the yard when we started, and all the boats were named after members of his family, starting with Kate Elizabeth and Richard John. Our favourites were Amy Clare, a tidy medium sized boat, and Peter Michael, which at 65 feet was rather longer. Many of the shells were by Peter Nicholls, who hadn't started concentrating on wide beams at that time.
It meant that we often started our holiday by boating up the locks we're just now coming down: Radford Bottom, the Fosse, Wood, Welsh Road and the Bascote flight with its two chamber staircase. Then came the slog up Stockton from Itchington Bottom to Stockton Top, ten locks in a mile and a half, the ones we've just done in reverse.
We made good time down them today. We were on our own for the first two, but then saw an Alvechurch boat starting at the top and waited in the third lock for them to catch up. They proved to be three generations of very pleasant Dutch folk, and we had a great time with them. We've stopped below Itchington Bottom, just before the pair of pubs, where The Two Boats gazes across the cut at The Cuttle Inn like a star crossed lover.
There are another six pubs in the village, as Brian commented the other day, but we won't be patronising any of them this time, as it's a dry night tonight for us.
Meanwhile, we've seen a few of the original Kate Boats around, though standards have clearly slipped in one respect at least. In Eric's day, they always touched in the blacking before you took the boat out, and let you see them doing it. It made you ever so careful of the boat in the locks, believe me, as any scrapes would be down to you. Nowadays, the boats don't look like they've had any external maintenance this winter. Even the newest one we saw, with a 519xxx number (so just one and a half seasons old at most), looked battered and scraped all down her sides.
We rang Saltisford this morning, not having had a reply to an email, and they've got a 70 foot slot available from Wednesday, so that's Sheila able to plunder Warwick whilst I'm away.
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We hired Amy Clare in 2006 when we did an extended Leicester Ring in a fortnight. It was while sharing one of the double locks on the T&M that we were told about OwnerShips and how much cheaper it was than hiring all the time. So that's when this owning rather than hiring lark began.
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