Scarboreugh / Redhill Marina

February this year marks a couple of tenth anniversaries for us.

On the 14th February Oleanna’s baseplate was laid at Tim Tylers in Newcastle Under Lyme. We visited her on the 15th and got to stand on the bare steel 58ft 6″ apart with cuppas in hand. What an exciting day that was. Once the majority of her hull was completed she was moved over to Sheffield for Jonathon Wilson to finish off the shell, then for Finesse to work on her fitout.

It doesn’t feel like ten years ago in many ways, but it does in others.

I maybe should have worked out her total milage and locks over the ten years, but as she wasn’t officially launched and handed over to us for over a year I’ll save that for the anniversary of when she got her bottom wet for the first time.

Also back in 2016 we’d been without a second mate for a year. Whilst we moored at Kings Marina in Newark for the winter I hunted round the internet hoping we’d be able to rehome a rescue cat. One cat caught my eye with Burton Joyce Cat Rescue. They had no probelm rehoming to someone living on a boat, but they’d rather we adopted a younger cat, the one I’d spied was a year old. I’d thought this might be better for Mick as he’d never lived with a kitten. We waited and around the beggining of February the ladies at the cat rescue got in touch offering us Amelia, a Tuxedo kitten of around four months old, she was the last of her litter. I requested a photo and on recieving it instantly fell in love.

Amelia had to wait to be picked up as we needed to be through Meadow Lane Lock in Nottingham before it closed for winter mainteneance. A handy visit from the London Leckenbys meant we could head to pick her up in a car. A few days later she was renamed Tilly, the Tiller cat, Cat Stevens singing in my head

Ten years later both Tilly and Oleanna are bored and wanting to be back on the water. But they will both have to be patient, as will we.

0 locks, 0 miles, 10 years of Oleanna, 10 years of Tilly, 2 very lucky boaters.