Our Thames barge finally makes it to site

So it’s true what they say – time flies when your stress levels are off the scale and you can’t sleep for thinking about what the weather is going to be doing for the next two weeks.

For those who have read our previous posts about preparing the site and getting the barge lifted at Shepperton Marina, or even watched our videos on YouTube, you might instantly notice a couple of discrepancies with both the date and the colour of the lorry delivering the barge. Clearly the truck carrying this beautiful lump onto site has changed and, more importantly, we are now two-and-a-half months further into the year.

The long and the short of it is that our barge was brought to site the same day as it was lifted from the Thames, and parked-up ready for the site lift the following day. Unfortunately, due to the endless rain that our site had been hit by for a whole month, the moment we tried bringing the crane on site to do the lift it sank into the ground! I cannot quite describe the feeling of being stood in the rain on a freezing winter morning with a 300 ton crane pulling off site on one side of you and a 45 ton barge sat on the other with nowhere to go.

So – there was nothing more to do than call it all off. Thankfully the team at Southern Cranes were happy to have the barge delivered to their site just up the road and stored there but to have come so close to getting everything completed on such a short deadline but falling at the last hurdle was really stressful.

Two-and-a-half months later and lots of extra site preparation and we were back on site to try again, though to be honest it was really waiting for the wettest winter and spring ever to finally run out of steam that allowed us to consider trying for a second lift.

Even despite the best of efforts the day for the lift went far from smoothly. It soon became apparent that the hardcore and heavy-duty mats we’d had put down weren’t in the right places for the crane’s outriggers so the crane crew suddenly found themselves being ground-workers for a day as we shoveled and shifted areas of hardcore around to get them into the right places. Emotions ran pretty rapidly from optimism to despair and back again every few minutes and then suddenly, whilst I was having a fight with a particularly feisty Blackthorn bush I was trying to cut back, the truck carrying the barge was suddenly being backed onto site. We were going for a lift!

Just like the lift at Shepperton the actual moving of the barge from one point to the other was over in just a few minutes. With the outriggers sitting squarely on our re-arranged hardcore pads and the strops placed perfectly for a balanced lift it suddenly dawned on me that the barge was no longer sitting on the truck bed but was floating just above it. All came good as it was swung over and lowered down and squared-up perfectly with the location markers on the site, before sitting down nice and level on the steel screw piles we had previously installed.

So, well, blimey – our barge was actually in and sat on site at last. While the crane crew went about their business of breaking everything down and moving off site I just stood around in a daze. To-be-honest although we’ve uploaded a video of the lift to YouTube here I can still hardly look at it without feeling fairly ill and still find myself checking what the weather’s going to be doing for the next two weeks! I would have tried to take more photos and video on the day but I quite brilliantly managed to rub grit in my eye (so I couldn’t see too much) and then managed to rake out a a long section of my finger whilst trying to undo a bolt. It turns out that a tube of Savlon and a few old plasters doesn’t quite cut it as a first aid box…