nautical sayings

7/06/26

‘Blue Bucket Of Gold’ is the newsletter of signed artist and traveller Catrin Vincent, formerly the front-woman of the band Another Sky. Subscribe for news about my first solo record, touring dates and reflections on life in a van and a boat.

Moving day again. Again? Wow. I buy a medical syringe from the pharmacy, explain I live on the boat. It’s one pound. The cheapest thing I’ve purchased in a while. The woman at the counter says she watches the boat man on telly, wishes me luck.

I sail into tomb-raider Enfield lock. It’s half-mechanical, half-manual. A woman called Helen asks me loads of questions about boats as I try to watch the ropes, the lock, the water level. I say,

‘it’s hard’.

And that’s honest. A wide beam has sailed through every lock in the opposite direction, so they’re all set at my level - gates wide open for me. Fate. But I nearly get stuck on a fallen tree, reversing to navigate around it. A stranger on the towpath shouts,

‘I’ve reported it to the CRT’.

Another lock - half-mechanical, half-manual again. A man in a truck laughs when I jump on the boat roof to get up to the top, then silently helps me with the gate. I want to ask what his name is, but I don’t. Sense not to.

It’s peaceful, up here. Far from everything. My commute is now horrendous. But the greenery reminds me of the countryside I grew up in, and feels closer to home than the inner bustling of the city.

I sail through weeds, then suddenly lose my steering power. Shit! I’m luckily angled towards a man’s boat. I can double moor to it! I do get his name - ‘Ryan’. I’m trying to tie to his boat but my ropes have knots in. When things go wrong with boats, this is when you can’t have things like knots in the ropes. That’s what Lorena told me at Ponder’s End.

I use the punting stick to get all the weeds off the propeller. I can steer again, but I swear something is wrong with the engine throttle. I’m paranoid, though. It’s just the cross-wind.

I get to the water point, but a long hose snakes to a boat moored nearby. I knock on the boat’s door to ask how long its inhabitants think it’ll take, and a fluffy old cocker-spaniel barks at me, emerging to guard his home. I assuage the dog, who takes a liking to me. He can sense I’m safe. I speak to the man.

He’s got lung disease and has been boating for 15 years. He says he gets past one lock, then has to lie down. He talks about how the CRT are trying to make the canals full of rich boaters with permanent moorings. They’re trying to end the idea of travellers. From everything I’ve seen, I agree. I ask his name. Dell. His dog? Brian.

I’m struck by how many people in boats are in these situations, struggling. I think about my own. I think about how this is a ‘poor man’s game’, but also people’s way of life, one they grow accustomed to and fond of…one people become proud of.

I think about how isolated I felt when I got on the boat, how ‘other’ and out of the ordinary I felt. I hadn’t prepared myself for how much boating is a way of life; something that becomes your identity, not something you just do.

And I think about how much I treasure being alone, now. How it strangely feels much safer. There’s no one to disappoint or hurt you if you’re this self-sufficient. But life no longer feels lonely…life feels like freedom. I wonder what’s changed. Me?

I think about sovereignty. How to be on a boat is to be self-governed. And I think about how everything we don’t understand comes for us, eventually. How every conflict we have, we will one day experience from the other side. I think about whose experience and life I might be trying to understand.

I think about when I told my therapist a memory of placing a plant pot over snails, trying to keep them safe. And they just crawled out the hole in the top. They fled. They already had a home - the shell that was their body.

I fill up my water tank. The tank is so empty, I can hear each drop echo around the water chamber. I last filled it up just over a month ago. It’s good to know the water can last that long, though. I wasn’t being that conservative.

As the water fills up, I decide I’m going to see what this weed hatch is all about, just incase there are more weeds I couldn’t reach. I use a wrench to open it. This is mad! A doorway into the canal. I can’t find any weeds. I must have caught them all with my punting stick.

I think about why so many metaphors came from boating. Learning the ropes. Jumping ship. Whatever floats your boat. Missed the boat. Making leeway. On an even keel. The bitter end. Chock-a-block. A clean slate. No room to swing a cat. Under the weather.

All nautical sayings. I wonder why humans have such an affinity with water. Well, boating was the first bridge across oceans.

And…the water tank is full! I catch it just as it overflows, like I have a sixth sense. I worry about the engine, but it seems okay again. The wind is gone. I move a bit, then pull out my mooring pins, not daring to use the CRT bollards. I also tie my boat to a railing, a risky move so close to a CRT centre. But if I get told off, I’ll just whack out another mooring pin.

Blue Bucket Finds:

This substack is named after Sufjan Steven’s ‘Blue Bucket Of Gold’, a song about the Blue Bucket myth. Kids wandered off from a mining camp in Oregon and came back with their blue bucket filled with gold, but nobody could figure out where they had found the gold, or find it again. So let me indulge you in some things from my blue bucket.

Reading:

Honestly? SP404SX and nord keyboard manuals.

Listening:

Someone sent me this album on here. Thank you, Simon. It’s gorgeous: