The unpredictable adventures of boating

A lovely onboard dinner, followed by a film completed another enjoyable day yesterday.

This morning began with a lie-in again, followed by coffee as usual. But mother discovered a little problem. The onboard sewage tank appeared to be full enough, that mother’s final deposit was rejected, which meant completing the journey to Great Haywood Marina today instead of tomorrow.

This was not a hardship, as we’re mooching along pretty slowly, with only nine miles to go before we reached the Marina anyway. But we decided to go in, get pumped out and top up diesel, then go down the canal for a while before turning around and mooring up.

The weather was highly changeable again. At one particular lock, father and I started it in our full wet weather gear with a full on deluge from the skies attempting to drown us. By the time we finished that one single solitary lock, I was shuffling around in my very wet and very sweaty wet weather gear while father had stripped down to shorts and tee-shirt with sunglasses and sun-hat because it was so sunny and hot.

Mother was looking forward to seeing two crows that like having bread thrown at them to catch in mid-air. Unfortunately, they were not in residence when we passed. We went hunting for a kingfisher for dad, and located one fairly soon after the hunting started. It flew across the canal in front of us and was last seen heading for the river next door.

The wildlife was good to us today, and although there were no swimming squirrels, there were flocks of gossiping sparrows in the hedgerows, the odd robin, four goldcrests taking off from a bush, and the odd heron fishing from the back of a boat.

With children back at school, new boaters are taking advantage of the shoulder season, and there were some entertaining experiences. Two boats in convoy followed us, fairly closely behind which, with locks ahead of us was somewhat indicative of their inexperience, as they would then be backed up while we went through the locks. This inexperience was further demonstrated when they had to queue behind us for entry to the lock, and made a spontaneous decision to park sideways across the canal (a deliberate decision, honest), a manoeuvre that failed to impress the boater attempting to come out of the lock to let us in.

But entertaining doesn’t have to be relegated to just new boaters – getting out of the marina we encountered a small boat that decided it needed the entire marina to manoeuvre and then questioned what we were doing as we backed away out of the boats it had tried very hard to push us into.

We are into the running down phase now, which means eating and drinking whatever weird and wonderful quantities and combinations are need to finish things off. This phase has started with too much Pimms in the Pimms so that we don’t need to take the bottle home. Is such a hardship.