Boat Blog: Keeping the Basingstoke Canal alive…

Friday 15th March

The Byfleet Boat Club had an excellent presentation this evening, featuring the Basingstoke Canal’s “Heroes and Villains”. The speaker, Roger Cansdale, outlined the canal’s troubled history right up to its troubled present. I though that Roger might be being over-dramatic when he said it was a miracle that there was a canal left at all, but as he wove the tale of dastardly chicanery involved in its management over the centuries I had to agree with him!

I won’t go through the details of the presentation – if you want to know more then invest £3 in the Basingstoke Canal Society’s booklet “A history of the Basingstoke Canal”- available from their website – click here…

The crux of the talk was that while it takes hard work and vision to restore a canal, it’s as nothing to the hard graft needed to keep it alive when the fanfare of the re-opening ceremonies has faded. So, what can do to keep the canal alive…..?

…..by boating there – what easier and more pleasant way can there be to keep a canal working 🙂

So, what else can you do to keep the canal alive?

Of course, donations are eternally welcome and they’re always looking for volunteers to help with various projects – Roger couldn’t overestimate how important volunteers will be to the ongoing maintenance of the canal.

So, we’ll be joining a convoy at Easter to cruise the available length of the canal – currently as far as Odiham. There are an impressive number of boats booked on – in fact, it may be the biggest boating event since the jubilee! If you have a boat in the vicinity why not come along – click here to get to the details and booking form.

If you don’t have a boat in the vicinity then why not join us as day crew – we’ve got room for 4 – 6 people. We’ll be cruising along the Basingstoke from Thursday 28th March to Saturday 30th; we’ll do the return trip the weekend after. If we get innundated with interested then we can always put the word out to the rest of the convoy – there are quite a few locks so I expect that extra crew members will be made very welcome indeed 🙂

So, why not take the easy option – come boating on the Basingstoke – if you’re inspired then you can get satisfyingly muddy with the volunteers 😀