Name Seal

BCN 14390 now named SEAL was built in 1873 by Alfred Hickman in Bilston for the Great Western Railway Company, and is what is commonly known as a MkII Bantock.  It operated as a horse drawn day boat taking goods from factories on the Birmingham Canal Navigations to railway interchange basins on the canal system where good were offloaded onto trains. 

Sometime in the 1970's it was motorised,  given a more modern stern end and named PHOENIX and the stern end was used to form another boat named OMEGA

At some point in the 1990's it was known as STRANGENESS before being sold in 1998 in a poor condition to a previous owner Richard Porter (a boatman) who restored it as a cargo boat with blue tops and changed its name to SEAL in homage to an old boatman who he had worked with who lived on FMC Seal.  In 2006, Porter also added a cabin.