I’ve been bitten badly in the leg and it is taking its time to heal. It was also incredibly painful, swelled quickly and made me feel quite nauseous for a while. The suspect a spider! A false widow to be more exact, from what I could work out from its mangled remains. I don’t mind spiders. I don’t go into panic mode when I see them, but just to give a flavour of how I feel let’s give this article a catchy acronym: Big Roaming Spider Territory Deterrents.

Did you know there are 650 types in the UK of which 12 can inflict a bite on a human? The false widow being most feared, followed by the garden and the cupboard. So that’s three we can find on board before we get past the galley. OK what to do? I made a school boy error years ago by using a direct killer from a well know brand – what I wasn’t expecting was the cockpit vinyl windows to age twenty years in a week and after that I never tried it again. So we are going organic and using a mixture of incense sticks (because I found some in charity shop going cheap) and tea tree oil, although peppermint apparently also works, as does half a lemon. This is after first giving all the cracks and crevasses a good hoovering out and, more importantly, emptying the hoover immediately as I’ve seen them crawl back out of the nozzle. Having said that, years ago I was complaining about cluster flies.

On with the show and it’s been a good summer cruising about– usually from pub to pub or tearoom and I will admit to pushing the old tub hard on a few Sunday afternoons to make it in time for a coffee and a pasty. As I have got older, I have realised that I am less agile, and the canal can be a lonely place. We shy away from thinking about safety because it’s rammed down our throat by every corporation’s, “It’s our number one priority!” And the boat safety doesn’t cover the most obvious danger - us!

So here is my over 60s list...

• Boarding ladder essential always have it down when cruising, I don’t think I could pull my self back on board up the hull any more.

• Deck-harness and two lanyard clips when using ladders in a lock, OK its slower, but an incident in Semington made me think! Hitting my own deck from 10 foot wouldn’t be good.

• Windlass, belt clip and lanyard – nothing worse than trying to climb a ladder with one in your hand.

• Drop the canopy!! I used to be able to enter and exit through roll up doors quite easily. Now I find its far easier just to step into the cockpit.

• Engine shut off, especially in the locks – I find this odd because on level 2 powerboats we must wear a lanyard that kills ignition if we leave helm. Anyway, I saw a boat leave Seend top lock by itself as its owner caught the rope around the morse lever.

• Life jacket – I never used to wear one then I started wearing self-inflatables which also have harness points built in.

• Centre mooring cleat, mine is lashed through the two handrails but a rope in centre makes handling so much easier on your own.

• Last but not least and we all carry one but never use it, the boat hook with one modification, the handle has been drilled out so you can attach it to your boat. I’ve even become a dab hand at being able to loop a rope onto a bollard with the hook and not leave the boat.

Improvement of the year is having one-way valves on the bilge pumps, this keeps a certain amount of water in the exit pipe so when you start the pump it has something to push against and stops that cavitation you get with impeller pumps and also stops what’s left in the pipe from falling back into the boat.

The second improvement is ditching the large batteries in favour of smaller motorcycle batteries – now I don’t have a large solar set up like some boats, mine are trickle charge in fact I doubt they give out more than 2amps. Also the out board is essentially a motorcycle engine and its generator isn’t that powerful and what have found is smaller amperage batteries are fully charged (obviously) far easier than some great lump of a leisure battery which doesn’t seem to get above 80percent without being hooked onto mains for two days. Now I have three small batteries giving a total of 120 amps but each with its own solar trickle -Lets see what happens over winter.

Lastly a few things that have worked well! That sticky-back plastic – I haven’t painted anything for ages and it’s been on the deck outside for years. Pouring dilute waterproof pva down every deck screw I could find - not a leak in sight! Remember - you read that here first!