wild-swimming

22/06/26

‘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.

This weeks iPhone notes reflections:

I’m not going to get through this with more punishment. I’m going to get through this with more empathy

Make the album you need to hear

Go outside, it’ll change everything

Moving day, to Cheshunt. Everyone has told me this is the absolute goldmine of the boating world. I wiggle the mooring pins free and get myself through a lock. A beautiful boat with a bustling garden gracing its roof sails through next to me - Peter and Yanka. Yanka is trailing alongside the boat on the towpath, cup of tea in hand.

We enter the second lock, and suddenly my throttle has lost total power. Peter decides to tie my boat to theirs, and they tow me to a suitable mooring spot, holding my midline as I hammer in mooring pins. I keep saying thank you, and they respond with,

‘The boating community helps each other’.

If they hadn’t have been there with me, in that lock, I’d have had to use my punting stick to get to the side, or pulled the boat along the towpath by the midline, potentially clunking into other boats. And this week? I have just not had the strength.

Being a solo woman boater has meant the world to me, because never before in my life have I relied solely on myself. I didn’t know I could do it. And it has had its really difficult moments, and lots of tears. Maybe life would be easier and I’d be a better musician if I just had a safety net. But it has also shown me I can be completely self-sufficient, I can rely on myself and the whole world doesn’t totally collapse if I go through hardship.

I made the choice to do this because I didn’t really have another choice. I haven’t dreamt of living on the water my whole life. I never once gave narrowboats a second thought until now, and had no idea how they worked, or how hard boat life would be.

But my options were to stay in the midlands as a face to face fundraiser, or come to London and live on a boat.

I knew I’d have to make it work. And make it work, I did. I’ve learned so much, seen so much, grown so much.

The journey has been very short, today, but I am grateful for kind strangers. I need to believe that I am held - that I’m never truly as alone as I believe. That there is always kindness. Always.

There is wild-swimming here, and endless, endless leaves. A group of men getting wrecked in a forest. A big statue of sticks, and the family of Canadian geese Yanka warned me about who swim up to the boats, expecting to be fed.

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

The Myth of Normal - Gabor Mate

Listening