Log entry 3 of 4 · Winter
Winter mooring on the Lee: stoppages, the stove and the frost week
From November to March the boat mostly stays put, and the log gets thinner. This entry gathers what four households have learned about keeping her dry, warm and undamaged through a winter on the Lee, including the week in January when the water froze around her.
- First written up
- 25 January 2026
- Last amended
- 8 March 2026
- Time to read it
- Roughly 8 minutes
- Home waters
- Regent's Canal and the Lee Navigation
Stretch 1
Why the boat stops moving
Winter on the canals is when the navigation gets its maintenance. Locks are drained and repaired, gates are replaced, and whole stretches are closed for weeks at a time. The list of closures is published ahead of the season, and the first job every autumn is to read it with a pencil and cross off the trips that are no longer possible. Most winters at least one lock between our mooring and the Regent's Canal is shut for part of January, which settles any debate about going into town.
Rather than fight that, we keep the boat on a winter mooring on the Lee from the start of November. It is a stretch of bank with a permit for the season, a water point within walking distance and a bin store nearby. The boat does not go far. Instead, each household takes a turn to visit at weekends, run the engine to charge the batteries, light the stove for a day to dry the cabin out, and check the bilge and the ropes. It is less romantic than cruising, but it is what keeps the boat fit for the spring.
The one trip we do make in winter is a short run in December to the nearest services, to empty the cassette, fill the water and take on a few bags of coal. After that, the engine only runs at the mooring and the log turns into a record of visits rather than journeys.
Stretch 2
Running the stove without frightening ourselves
The boat has a small cast-iron multi-fuel stove in the saloon, and in winter it is the reason anybody wants to visit. We burn smokeless coal on overnight visits and seasoned wood during the day when someone is awake to tend it. We do not burn the painted offcuts people leave on the towpath, or anything damp, because both gum the flue up with tar and make the whole boat smell for a week.
The rules we agreed after our first winter are short. There is a carbon monoxide alarm at head height in the saloon and another in the back cabin, and whoever arrives first tests both. The stove door stays shut unless somebody is loading it. The ash pan is emptied into a metal bucket with a lid, and the bucket leaves the boat only when it is stone cold. The chimney comes off the roof before the boat moves under anything low, and whoever takes it down looks the collar over for cracks.
The most useful thing we added was a small fan that sits on the stove top and runs off its heat, pushing warm air down the length of the boat instead of letting it pool around the saloon. Before it, the back cabin could be ten degrees colder than the front. It is the only piece of kit this log will ever mention with affection.
Crew checklist
- Test both carbon monoxide alarms on arrival, every visit
- Smokeless coal overnight; dry, seasoned wood only by day
- Ash into the lidded metal bucket, off the boat only when cold
- Chimney down before any low bridge, collar checked for cracks
Stretch 3
Condensation, the other winter problem
A steel boat in cold weather is a condensation machine. Warm, damp air from cooking, breathing and wet coats meets the cold hull and the windows, and within a day the insides of the portholes are streaming. Left alone, the water gathers under the mattresses and in the cupboards along the cabin sides, and by February there is mould in the corners of the wardrobe. In our first winter, one household's sleeping bag went green along one edge.
What works for us is ventilation first and heat second. The mushroom vents on the roof stay open all winter, even when it feels like madness to let cold air in. A window on each side is cracked open for an hour after cooking. Mattresses are lifted and propped on their edges at the end of each visit, and the cupboard doors under the side bed are left open. We also stopped drying wet clothes inside the boat. It is easier to carry them home in a bag than to spend a Saturday wiping windows.
Between visits the stove goes out, and the boat is left with moisture traps in the back cabin and the saloon. They fill faster than you would believe. Emptying them is on the visit checklist, and the amount they collect in a fortnight is written down, which is how we know the worst month is not January but the damp, mild weeks of late November.
Stretch 4
The week the water froze
In the second week of January the cold settled over London for eight days, and on the fourth morning the water around the boat was frozen from bank to bank. It was only a few centimetres thick, but steel hulls and ice do not mix well once anyone tries to move. A boat pushing through thin ice can have the blacking scraped off at the waterline, and the sheets it breaks up can cut into lighter boats moored nearby. We did not move, and nor did anyone else on the mooring.
The visits that week were about the plumbing. The water tank was left about three-quarters full, with room to expand but enough in it that the pump would not run dry. The pipes under the galley were lagged where we could reach them, and the drain on the water heater was opened on the last visit before the coldest nights, as the previous owners had noted in pencil inside the cupboard door. The engine coolant had been checked in October, which is the kind of dull autumn job that pays off in a week like that one.
When the thaw came, the ice broke up in a single afternoon, with a strange creaking and ticking along the hull as it went. The boat came through without damage. The log entry for that week is the longest of the winter and mostly consists of temperatures, but at the bottom, in a different hand, someone from another household has written that the Lee had never looked so beautiful, and nobody has argued with that.