第14章 Dead Engine

The engine died on the twenty-eighth of May at about ten past four in the afternoon, four miles above the second lock, in gear, loaded, with the wind on the beam, which is the classic way and which I had been in twice before. What happened was this. I was in the cabin — I was in the cabin because I had a laptop on the table and a form to fill in and a woman of seventy-eight in the bow who wanted to be shown how the pump worked, which is a thing you do not refuse and which I am bad at, and I had my back to the engine and the throttle was open and the engine was at fifteen hundred. I heard it. That's the thing. I heard the note change, and I knew what it was before I had any evidence, because I have been listening to this engine since 2016 and I know every sound it makes, and the sound it made was a thing I have never heard it make. Then it stopped, and the boat coasted, and the stern came round in the current, and I got the tiller over and got the bow onto the bank in about four seconds, which for a forty-one-foot boat in a four-foot cut with a barge due is a genuinely good piece of handling and I would like it noted. The woman of seventy-eight said, "Is that a fault?" And I said, "That's an engine fault. Stay in the cabin. Get everybody to the front." Which is the correct answer and is also, I understood about two hours later, an answer that cost me a job. Because the correct answer is not "get everybody to the front." The correct answer, in a hired boat with a dead engine and a barge coming, is to call the emergency helpline and say the boat's disabled in the channel, and give your position, and that summons a crewed boat from Anderry Wharf in about twenty minutes, and the crewed boat will take your line and tow you to a wall. I did not do that. What I did instead was get a line out, the heavy one, the bow line, twenty-two metres, from the bow locker, which is a thing I have done a hundred times on this boat and which took me two minutes because the locker stuck, and then I got it round the mooring bollard on the towpath, which is not the same thing as towing, because a bollard is not a towpath ring and it is a cast-iron bollard set into a stone wall and I put a 22mm line round it with a spring-loaded snap shackle in the cold and the cold and the wet with a dead engine in a four-foot cut. It held. I want to say that clearly. It held, and I held, and the boat came to a stop in about nine seconds against the wall with a hundred and ten of steel on the end of it, and the barge went past at eleven knots and the wash took the bowline's slack out and the snap shackle held and the bollard held and the wall held. What I did not do is look up. I did not look up at the time of the barge. I did not look up. There is a rule and the rule is that you look at the bridge. If there is a bridge and you are in a channel and something has gone wrong, then you look at the bridge before the barge gets there, because the skipper of that barge is doing exactly what I am doing and he has not got the advantage of an outboard engine, and if the two of you are both in the same twenty metres of water with a line across it, then somebody has to be the one who sees the other one. I have been on this cut since 2011 and I have not had a line across a channel since 2020 and I have never once been in a situation where a person in my care might have been hurt because I was looking at a shackle instead of at a bridge. That is what I did not do. I stood on a boat in the middle of a canal with my back to a bridge and a line across the channel and I did not look up, and I got it right, and I would give almost anything in the world to have not got it right. Here is what I have found out since, and it is the reason this chapter is in the book. There is a text. There is a text at the maritime coastguard for inland waterways that says, and I am quoting: *If your vessel becomes disabled in a navigable channel, immediately display an orange flag by day or a red light by night, sound six blasts of the whistle, and make fast your mooring lines. Give way to all other vessels.* Six blasts. Not a mooring. Six blasts. There is a woman of seventy-eight on a hired boat in my care who did not know that, and there is a member of the public's husband of seventy-four standing in the bow of a boat, and there is a person in a barge cabin on a bridge who did not know. There is an inquiry. It has been referred, because I made the report myself, which I have been told is not how you do it and which I have been told is what you do. I saw a helpline on the Friday night. I saw a person in a room in a station in Derby at eleven o'clock at night who had been a river pilot for thirty-one years and who wrote down everything I said and then said the sentence that has been in my head every day since. He said, "Mr Pike, did you know you were disabled?" And I said, "I knew the engine had stopped." He said, "Was there a bridge?" And I said, "There is a bridge." He said, "Then you knew you were disabled," and he said it kindly, which made it much worse, and then he said, "Nobody gets that wrong twice, Mr Pike. That's the whole job. You get it right until you can't, and then you get it right once more, and that's it, that's the whole of it, and you're not allowed to get it wrong twice, and you haven't, and you wrote it down yourself, and I'd be worried about you if you hadn't." And then he said the thing I will not forget: "And you know why the second time works? Because the second time is the one that frightens you. You weren't frightened today. Tomorrow you will be, every single time, for the rest of your life, and that's the job, and there's no way to get it back to how it was today, and I'm not going to pretend to you that anybody likes that, and I've had it thirty-one years and I still flinch." Then he said, "Now. Tell me about the woman on the bow." I said, "She was on the bow." He said, "Then that's the first thing you get right, and you got it before you got anything else right, and you got it in about two seconds, and you'll keep doing that, because the women on the bow are why the rule exists and not the collision." There is an inquiry in the spring. There will be a hearing. There is no charge, because nothing was damaged, and the barge did not stop, and the line held, and the woman of seventy-eight got back to her mooring at seven in the evening and told her husband that the driver had been very good and had taken care of them, and the husband said yes, he had, and that was the end of it as far as they were concerned for ever. I do not know whether the inquiry will find anything. I have read the river code twice and I am a boat owner of nine years with four years of a disorderly brain and a man who is in love with his ex-wife, and I do not know whether the answer is six blasts, or a flag, or a helpline, or whether those are three separate things and I did one of them and did it late. I am going to have to know. I have started a book of it — not this one, a separate one, a single hardback from the yard, a boat log with a number stamped in the front cover and no title on the spine, and I have written eleven pages in it and it is the first time in my life I have written a thing out that I did not already know, and it is the only time in my life I have written a thing out and then sat and read it back and not been able to improve it.