The film shown below was taken during a holiday on the Monmouth and Brecon canal in a Narrow Boat in the summer of 1978.
About the film
This film was part of a set of super 8 films I bought recently from eBay. I think I paid about £12 for a collection of 8 reels in total, mostly 5 inch, 400 feet reels and one 7 inch.
I've decided to try to find more super 8 films to add to the site rather than standard 8, because the method I'm using to convert the films to digital is producing better results with the larger super 8 film than it does with standard 8. That's not really a surprise, I would expect the larger film area to give better results, but the point is that at the moment the standard 8 films are looking really bad. I need to make progress with my plans to build my own telecine machine, but I'm finding it difficult to find the time at the moment.
Images from the film
The images in this gallery will give a taster of the contents of the film embedded below.
Film of the Holiday on a Narrow Boat in 1978
The film is shown below.
I find this film particularly fascinating because as a family we have been on Narrow Boat holidays which were very similar to the one shown here. Ours were in the early 1990s so a little bit more recent than the one shown in this film, but I would guess that the experience for the family shown in this film was very similar to ours.
With one exception I found our narrow boat holidays very enjoyable.
It is a very peaceful few days watching the world go by at about 4 mph, especially if you could avoid the boat navigation aspects of the holiday. In our case, because my brother was also present and he had been an officer in the merchant navy, there was no problem on that front and I remember some very idyllic times interspersed with the occasional stop at a pub for a meal.
What was the exception? The cleaning and toilet facilities on the boats we had were horrible. The shower was hardly big enough to actually stand in, the shower basically dribbled a few drops of water over you and I won't go into the chemical toilets((Well I had to, but you know what I mean ))
Of course it is my memory of my holidays which lead to the use of the words 'enjoyable' and 'memorable' in the title of the post but I'd be surprised if the family who featured in this film didn't also feel the same way.
