Out of the wet dock, Quintessence in her new glory! Ian did a fantastic paint job – battle ship grey, with a white roof and some black with a white bow flash. We love it! It was worth all the work and worry, “Quinnie” looks like a new barge. There wasn’t much time to ponder, we had a cruise planned up to Ricki, aka Rickmansworth. Good Bye London – we’re heading to the Midlands…

Here we are in Kings Cross again. Slightly nervous as Sava, our cat, disappeared from here a year ago. We’ve chosen a different mooring though, Battle Bridge Basin, what a location!

Et voilà, our view towards the basin:

And Natascha’s view towards the kitchen area:

Gosh, the area has changed so much – all the grubby corners are gone, so are the clubs where we used to go out. Instead the Granary Square looks sanitized, on the one side there is Central Saint Martin’s (CSM), opposite is a plush Waitrose where wealthy students buy their plastic wrapped food. Google UK is about to open their HQ too, who knows what the consequences for the area will be. One thing is for sure, it doesn’t necessarily help the local youth from less well heeled backgrounds. What is offered or available in this area is all very much out of reach for them. This creates cracks in society and the outcome is ugly: social segregation of the worst kind, ghetto vs swanky. One next to each other.

On a windy night, we were watching a movie, our barge was moored on the tow path and we had two other boat moored on ours, we could feel that somebody was jumping on our boat. This is unfortunately an occurrence every now and then but we didn’t pay much more attention. There was a second sudden jump and that was it, Natascha went to see what was going on. There they were, young kids probably from the council estates near by, really young children around 10 – 12 years old, brandishing a rather large knife and cutting the ropes of our boat! Luckily we used three ropes as one was severed already and they were just about to cut the second one, it was half way cut. So we lost two ropes, that’s about £50. Fortunately we had a spare one. And fortunately too, we were on the boat, this would have been a really annoying situation, finding your boat on the other side of the canal and not being able to reach it.

It’s January 2016, a cold but sunny day and the cruise yesterday was supposed to be nice and easy towards Mile End. But it wasn’t. We were already on the Regents Canal when the rattling started all over again, until the engine went silent. We were right in the middle of the canal and the only thing we could do was calling pedestrians on the tow path for help. One guy was kind enough to stop so we could throw the rope and he pulled us on to the canal edge. Thank you sir! Really, a very big thank you.

What the heck was wrong with the engine now? We pulled Quintessence to the spot we intended to moor, it wasn’t that far away and we managed easily. And then we remembered what Dominic said about the filter, it might be full of sludge, hence no fuel going through to the engine.

A new filter had to be ordered online, it arrived and Anton came around to help Adnan with exchanging it. Upon starting the engine Quintessence started rattling, shaking, coughing vigorously – we all thought she won’t make it but hey, she did!

The new and shiny diesel filter:

Finally we went back to normal, we could charge the batteries, we had hot water again and could shower on the boat. Though not having hot water was a welcome excuse to go over to friends to have a bath. Luckily we were in their neighborhood.