ShareA busy winter in the Beacon Park Boats yard
The Mon and Brec Canal has now closed at the end of the autumn season, but we will be busy in the boatyard until next Easter. And this winter is going to be like no other for one special reason! Watch our video
“The winter season is always
an interesting time here at Beacon,” says owner Alasdair.
“It’s like we have two jobs, and we are starting the second one. Over the summer months, we have been looking after our customers, making sure they have 5* holidays and now it is time to look after the boats.”
Every winter, our luxury canal boats are hauled out of the canal on a special trailer and taken into the the workshop, where their decks are sanded down, their hulls scraped, sanded and repainted; no mean feat on a 50’ canal boat. Their engines are serviced, including replacing the prop shaft bearings and we may even tweak the designs in response to customer requests. This is easy for us because we design and build our own boats.
To keep the workshop warm, we
have a huge delivery of two trailer loads of beech tree logs. “I say logs, but they are trunks really,”
says Alasdair, “and they all have to be cut and split to feed our biomass
boiler. It’s a 100KW boiler and it
consumes a lot of logs.
But it is better for the environment than burning oil or gas and fits with our policy of making our boats as efficient as possible; we even use a hybrid design with Coot.”
Beacon’s two kittens, Jam and Pickle are pleased about the log delivery, too; their basket is next to the hot water tank.
But the kittens are not going to stay undisturbed for long this winter. As well as servicing the canal boats, we are still hiring day boats and work continues on Falcon, Beacon’s new 8-berth boat, which will be the largest on the Mon and Brec.
And, for the first time ever, Beacon Park Boats will be open over the Christmas and New Year period.
Find the perfect narrowboat for you here: https://beaconparkboats.com/search/