Abigail Jenna

Well this is it.

I am in the process of buying the nb Lady Piper. At the moment she is high and dry at Blue Water Marina. Whilst she is on dry land I am going to take the opportunity to change the name. Being ex-RN I feel (as do many others) it is unlucky to change a name whilst it is afloat.

Her new name is to be Abigail Jenna in honour of my grand-daughter who is, as you might guess, the very apple of my eye. Although I have been looking on-line for a number of months and found a few that were better equipped the advantage here was that it would not take me a week to get the boat to within striking distance of home to load up. That aside when I took ABZ out to look at boats I had already decided on Lady Piper and she duly told me off for "buying the first one you see". Serves me right for saying it to her so often when we are in shops.

Lady Piper is quite live-aboard-able but I will be making changes - as one does - to suit my new life style. I hope that living afloat will also give me chance to be a little bit more green - environmentally - by using solar panels and heating with fallen branches picked up as I travel.

As the boat changes I will record these with the camera and blog them periodically.

While I was searching for a narrowboat and had found Lady Piper I put the name into Google on the off chance that I would find some of her history. Well she did get a mention in a November 2006 on the Canal World Discussion Forum after she had arrived at Thorne. The feeling at the time was that it looked as though a bomb had gone off inside. As you can a lot of work has been undertaken to remove all the shrapnel and make her presentable.

Once she is in the water we can get to know each other.