Herbie then and now

Hello. I’m back after being away for a couple of days in Lancashire.  Yes, Lancs where all the rain has been. It wasn’t flooded where we were but there we floods just up the road and looking at the Lancaster canal I don’t think it will require topping up for quite some time. In the B&B where were were staying there was a lady from Kendal who had popped down to Preston for a few hours and then couldn’t get back home for three days!  Anyway, on with the show.

While the Awards take a brief rest, it’s time to look back a bit, because in January it’ll be ten years (gosh) since made our first blog post saying we’d bought ourselves a narrowboat called Herbie.  Herbie looked a bit different then.

Come to think of it, so did we! I think that Herbie might have aged rather better than we have.

Herbie was up at Stanstead Abbots on the Lee navigation and I had to look up a map to make sure it was connected to the rest of the canal system.  For the first few weeks we were trapped up there waiting for a lock stoppage to finish so we tootled up and down the stretch between Stanstead Abbots and Hertford, which looking back, was a nice way to break ourselves in.  Here we are on our very first night out where we moored at the Saracen’s Head in Ware.

Our little Jacob, as he was then, was thrilled to bits that we had actually got a boat and was soon taking the tiller, standing on the rear deck seats to see over the top.

Now he is over six feet tall in bare feet with biceps like Sylvester Stalone.  Little Grace wasn’t even born.

I got the idea of keeping a blog from a chance meeting with Sue of No Problem when we were on the river Nene with our son on his boat.  So it’s all her fault that people have had to suffer 1387 of these posts and the number of visits to the Herbie blog are well in to the hundreds of thousands. I think it was Andrew Denny of Granny Buttons who first drew us to the attention of the wider blog reading public, he was very good at spotting new blogs and giving them a leg up. I didn’t dream then that we would make so many friends through doing it.  Some I still haven’t met in the flesh, some we have had very happy times boating with. Looking back at the early commenters from the blog, we see some familiar names still going strong today, but more of them in a later post.  Now that we are back home, the Herbie Awards resumes next time with the results of the Boat Equipment category and some proposals for Best Pub Quiz near the canal

Stay tuned.