You all know the occasion: that ten-minute wait as helmsmen share a wide lock with another boat, when conversation drifts to boat names. "So what is this TNC that your boat claims to be carrying?" Our set piece reply then follows: "TNC stands for Tuesday Night Club. It started off as a gentlemen's drinking night, back from our student days, from which members went boating. Since then we have bought narrowboat Earnest and the numbers have expanded to include crew from a collection of friends made from participating in the waterways news groups and e-mail mailing lists." Over the years it has been our aim to cruise all the navigable inland waterways of Britain, with an emphasis placed on little-used or hard-to-reach navigations. At first sight, the River Witham appears to be a dead straight, boring flood channel that just happens to be navigable. But when we first did it in our old narrowboat Beatty, we were fascinated by the backwaters and many watercourses protected by flood-doors that led off the main river, and in 2001 we decided to explore them all "in Earnest".
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