In praise of tillers

The lovely Adam and Adrian, whom many of you will know, pick up their beautiful brand new boat from Braidbar today, and watching a video tour of it I was amused to see that in spite of the boat being really really really high spec, they had decided not to have a bow thruster (or as Sue No Problem used to call it ' a girly button').  Apparently Adam had said something like (don't quote me) we're proper boaters and don't need one.

That got me thinking about how brilliant a tiller is.  You can go from full lock one way to full lock the other in a blink of an eye as well as making fine adjustments with a slight movement of your arm.  Not only that, you can feel the water force on the rudder and most of all, you feel 'at one' with the boat.  It's also of course an incredibly simple device in which there is hardly anything to go wrong.

I'm the first to admit that there are times when a bow thruster would be handy, but it shouldn't be used as a substitute for knowing how to handle a tiller.  Years ago we were walking down the snaking flight of locks at Marsworth when a very posh new boat came past with the 'helmsman' steering entirely with the bow thruster, even on the straight bits of the canal.  Every few seconds that familiar roar came from his bow as he adjusted the boat's direction.  His wife was on the towpath and when I questioned her why, she said "Oh he can't get on with the tiller so he only steers with the thruster" .  I thought to myself that he must only cruise in the mornings because his battery would be flat by lunchtime.

Some boats have steering wheels, which you might have thought would be easy. Well that's not my experience.

In 2014 I had to get my Inland Helmsman's Certificate in order to act as a volunteer boat mover for CRT, and a group of us were instructed and tested by the redoubtable Andrew Phasey- at that time Commodore of the St Pancras Cruising Club. 

Having been a boater for nearly ten years at that point I was quietly confident - until that is they asked us to do complicated manoeuvres on a CRT work boat with a steering wheel.

Dear reader I can't begin to tell you how hard it was. For a start the wheel had half a dozen full rotations lock to lock with nothing to tell you where the middle setting was. and being a hydraulic drive you got no feed back at all through the wheel. I'm embarrassed to tell you that even going straight along the middle of the canal I was doing a slalom. I suppose it didn't help that the boat had no rudder, but instead the Archimedes screw propeller swung right and left as you rurned the steering wheel amking coming into the bank a right nightmare. Talk about prop walk! Give me a tiller any day.  The ever patient Andrew didn't seem very impressed at all with any of us but as we knew all the other stuff about safety and using ropes and using locks etc, he passed all of us. In the succeeding weeks I drove this kind of boat on a number of occasions and although I improved a bit I never got the hang of coming neatly into the bank.

Shortly after qualifying,  I was also asked to drive CRT's whopping great exhibition boat Jena on a number of occasions. Here she is tied up on the narrow Slough arm after having turned round.

You might get a better idea of her size by seeing the inside:

Jena is 12ft wide and 60+ ft long and one time with several dignitaries on board I had to turn her round in a spot where the canal was only a couple of inches over 60ft wide, but with a good old tiller I managed it without much problem.  Would a bow thruster have helped?  Maybe, but I'm sure a pesky steering wheel wouldn't.

Now I'm just remembering an adventure on even bigger boat with a tiller. She was called Olive and she was a humber keel 14ft wide. Here she is at her berth in Cowley on the GU.

Olive was owned by a friend of a friend and they asked me to helm her down the GU to Brentford and onto the Thames. It was all very exciting because she only just fitted under the bridges and huge tiller arm, about eight feet long meant you had to walk from side to side to swing it through it's great arc. Boats coming the other way tended to panic and head for the bushes when they saw her coming.  In the end the whole trip was a failure because when we got into Norwood Top Lock she got wedged against the sides and it took over an hour to get her unstuck. Dave, her owner lost his nerve at that point and issued orders to abandon the trip so we backed her up to Adelaide yard where we turned her round and headed back home where we turned again and fitted her snugly back into her berth with only a few inches space fore and aft.  Despite all the problems we had that day, the tiller steering wasn't one of them and she steered really easily.

Sometimes the simplest device is the best.