Riccall Refurbishment 1999-2006

Part 2

So we now had Riccall back at the boatyard and it was time to get stuck in.

The first job was to get all the old wooden floor out of the hold. It was too far gone to try to re-use so we got a 50 gallon steel drum, knocked holes in the sides and bottom and set it on a triangle of concrete blocks. Then bit by bit, we loaded all the old wooden floor and about a ton of coal, which had landed up under the floor, into our makeshift brazier, and then added to global warming and our own, as the September weather was particularly hot that year.

Having exposed all the bottom ribs we now decided that the one inch layer of puddle cement, that had been used to protect the steel, when these barges were built, would also have to be removed.

We hired a pneumatic chisel and started work. Occasionally bits of cement would break away and reveal virgin oxide primed steel with all the old rivets in pristine condition. At other times the cement had cracked and allowed the coal acids to attack the steel underneath.

At one point I was attacking the cement on the turn of the bilge about half way down the starboard side when I lost concentration for a second. The next thing I knew the pneumatic chisel had gone clean through the bottom of the boat and Bloody Hell, we had a one foot high fountain of water coming in! I put my foot over it to stem the flow and called to Louise, quite calmly I thought under the circumstances, “Please could you come and put your foot on this, while I think what to do?”!!! We have since been told that to sit on the deck with a bare bottom (preferably female!) is the best thing to stop the water ingress but sadly I did not know that at the time and Louise meekly put her FOOT over the hole. Meanwhile I dashed around in small circles gathering the wherewithal to effect a repair. In the end (I think rather ingeniously) I found a bit of soft, thick walled, rubber tube and fashioned a tapered wooden peg to go into it. We stuffed the hose through the hole then hammered the peg down the centre of the hose. The soft rubber was forced into the shape of the hole and the water stopped almost completely. Louise, released form hole-covering duty, dashed up to Smiths Do-It-All (as it then was) to hastily acquire quick setting cement, which was then mixed and set over the hole in a small upturned bucket. And we continued the removal of the rest of the cement with renewed care.

Finally, when all seemed revealed we set off for our first dry-docking and a proper survey at ‘Hargreaves’, the commercial boatyard just one and a half miles away at Castleford Junction.

The survey found that a 30ft section of the starboard turn of bilge required plating (including of course the bit my chisel had gone through) and all the front section forward of the first bulkhead. The rest of the bottom was 4.5mm or more. Also that the prop shaft was ‘necked’ and the rudderstock and chain operating system badly worn. I knew I would be replacing all that in due course so that was not a problem so we had the plating done and set off back to the boatyard.

Winter was drawing in now so I fashioned a temporary wooden structure over the hold with 3" x 2" joists covered with 8 x 4 ft sheets of sterling board and waterproofed it all with heavy duty polythene sheet, held down by the time-honoured method of wedges driven into the cleats all along the coamings.

Under this protection we established a temporary floor in the hold area by laying thick pieces of chipboard over the ribs and I created a doorway into the forecabin through the bulkhead. To maintain the integrity of the forward bulkhead I made a waterproof door that could be closed when necessary to create a sealed forward area. The woodwork and every thing else in the forecabin was un-rescueable and had to be cleared out.

I also created an opening into the engine room, which again maintained the integrity of the bulkhead by virtue of having a sealable waterproof door.

I now felt it was time to install some ballast. When I had fitted out the narrowboat some years before I had been advised to use poured concrete for this purpose and it had been very quick, easy and successful. I decided that the same answer would serve well for Riccall. The only difficulty was getting the concrete wagon near enough the boat to be able to offload straight into the hold through a section of removed ‘roof’.

I had noticed an old coal chute near by at Castleford which I thought would be ideal, but I also knew it was a listed structure. So I hired some large plastic tubes (as used on demolition sites), covered the chute in heavy duty plastic and set the tubes up down the coal chute early on Saturday morning, having sailed Riccall down the night before. The concrete wagon duly arrived and started to offload. I had employed the services of about 3 extra members of the boatyard, so with Louise and I, and them, we started to manoeuvre the pour of concrete evenly over the bottom of the boat, stopping the pour every so often to move the boat forward or backward to the next area. At one point we were all in a panic as the boat began to list to port and all the wet concrete started to drift over to that side as well, exacerbating the situation. We all had to shovel like crazy to get the concrete back to starboard to even it out again.

However, in the end we had it evenly spread, managed to remove all evidence that we had been using a historic monument to install the concrete and Louise and I were left trying to get a reasonable finish on the surface of 15 tons of concrete with trowel, tamper and air poker – this last the most exhausting, to me, of the lot.

Eventually we cruised back to the boatyard with Riccall on average 8" lower in the water than she had been, but by adjusting the ratio of concreted between front and rear of the hold I had reduced the draught a bit less at the rear than at the bow and thus levelled her up a bit. I wanted to end up with a front to rear differential of only about 12" (300mm) rather than the more than 18" (450mm) Riccall had had when we bought her unladen, and this I had achieved. (Part luck, part calculation)

For the next stage I decided that, as I could not do it by myself due to the weight of the sheets of steel, I would get Jeff and whoever was available at the boatyard, to roof out the hold to my specification while I continued to work to earn a crust to pay them! This worked reasonably well and each evening I would see how things had progressed and spend 2-3 hours welding in noggins and finishing off bits where I could. One of the members of this ‘gang’ was a strange creature called Rhianne. She had arrived in a large van some months previously and bought an abandoned sailing boat project in which she was living, and supposedly continuing the build. In the meantime Jeff occasionally offered her work and one such case was on the Riccall roof. Rhianne was about 6ft tall, built like a Rugby player, with a deep voice, very long red hair, bright red fingernails and a large pair of unsupported boobs! She also had very little physical strength. There was, of course, much conjecture in the boatyard as to whether she was a man trying to turn into a woman, a woman in a man’s body or what. Her welding was adequate - not good - but she claimed to have built several fibreglass catamarans. The members of the boatyard accepted her for what she might be as they do with all the misfits that turn up and live there for a few months, or years, before moving on.

Another one of the ‘gang’ was called ‘new-age’ Ray (to differentiate him from ‘Knottingly’ Ray). He lived in a mobile home which he had constructed himself by grafting the back end of one dilapidated motor home onto the back of a slightly better truck. He lived in this at the boatyard during the week but at weekends he would drive it off to Sheffield (to his ex-wifes drive I think), or to the coast or the countryside then be back on Monday. His welding was pretty good.

Finally the basic structure of the roof and wheelhouse was done and I could carry on with the rest of the construction knowing that we were properly protected from the weather. The only downside of this was that now that the whole roof was steel the condensation dripping off it made it feel as though it was raining inside when, in fact it was a fine crisp day outside. This gave me the incentive to press on as fast as possible to get the inside to a stage where it could be sprayed with expanded polystyrene (in my opinion the very best way to protect and insulate a steel boat)