Does the boat rock?

This is a question we get asked a lot!  When we were on the narrow-boat the boat would rock ALL the time!  Gosh that sounds rude, but I don't mean it in that sense.  Simply by standing up and moving over to the other side would cause a rocking that we were quite used to, but newcomers to the boat would find a little strange.  The more people aboard as well the more rocking we would experience.  'Ooh, ooh, I just felt the boat move, ooh I feel sick, ooh that's strange...'

We would also find that the boat tilted to one side slightly, known as 'listing', too much heavy stuff would cause this and we would have to rearrange the ballast - heavy weights put in the bottom of the boat to even it out.  When we moved off the narrow-boat it was funny to see how much the boat had risen out of the water and our new boat now sits nicely in the water, although it lists slightly because the Heritage stove is quite heavy and we ought to move the ballast weights to even it out, although we are going to wait until we've got the rest of the work done and know where everything goes, because my mountain of books will probably even it out anyway.

We hardly feel the motion on the new boat at all, in fact the only time we've felt it was when the school groups were out in force in their speedboats tearing through the tunnel and the wake caused by this at the mouth of the tunnel made us rock around the clock! We had friends on the boat and the panic in their faces was a picture!  We'd been calmly chilling out and suddenly the little girl nearly falls off her chair.  Jam did the right thing though and asked the guys to slow down before coming out of the tunnel so as to dissipate the wake. I probably would have yelled at them 'Oi you brats, there is a speed limit you know!' But that wouldn't have got us anywhere, except for perhaps some more rocking and a bit of abuse!

So the old saying 'If the boat's a-rockin, don't come a-knockin' won't really apply on the new wide-beam, but safe to say, life's good, second trimester energy kicking in, and 'there be no fish under our boat!'