"You can moor anywhere", he said!

Very pleased with ourselves after the 10km race in Bath

You will know by now that much of our life is carefully planned with expert precision. Ian is well aware that spontaneity is not my forte and I don’t generally embrace the cheerful fatalism of ‘que sera, sera’. So, as you can imagine, canal life has come as quite a shock! The system is old and many of the locks are literally falling apart.

Ian exits 19ft
Bath Deep Lock

Best laid plans often have to be rewritten or torn up all together. The water levels were struggling, even before the recent heatwave, and we have managed to dodge a number of closures on the Kennet & Avon (K&A) where we are currently cruising, including the flight of locks at Caen Hill which has been shut for much of the last two weeks due to pump failure. Shut means exactly that - nothing can go up and down the canal, so you are literally stranded in whichever end you happen to be. Boats sink (really), bridges break and locks leak. The good news is that our big dates have held firm. We made it to Salisbury for Gordon & Jackie’s 40^th wedding celebration – a happy and lively affair with the wider family.

Brothers reunited, and Mum too!

We dined at Ping Coombes’ (#Masterchef 2017) Malaysian supper club in Bath and then ran off the calories in the Bath two tunnels 10km two days later. 4 km of the race was in old railway tunnels – wonderfully cool and surprisingly atmospheric.
Cruising the canals is, as you would expect, very relaxing for most of the day. We often start early, stop in little towns and villages (and the occasional pub or cidery) and have even mastered the convenience of the Sainsbury’s delivery to our moorings making shopping for staples and heavy items surprisingly easy.

The Fuel Station
Diesel can be found at little wharf fuel stations right on the side of the canal– basically a waterside petrol station. We have a large 220 litre tank, which will last us for four weeks or so, and of course no need of fuel for the car, which we really don’t miss at all.

We are both pretty expert at driving the boat into locks – not wanting to miss out on the fitness side of canal life, Ian insisted we did a helmsman course prior to getting the boat. This means I drive half of the time – quite surprising many of the other boaters where there is more often than not a traditional “man drives: woman works the locks” mentality. There is nothing I like more than watching the nervous glances when fellow boaters spot me at the helm, only to slide into a lock seamlessly with only an inch or so either side of the boat.
On board we are a bit more “traditional”. I do most of the cooking and essential housework – Ian does the engine checks and clears the weed hatch each day. So far his most interesting finds have been a compost bag (without the compost!) and a stray fender from the side of someone’s boat. Not ours this time! Our tally so far is two lost, three found, so we are up!
We have had the odd technical hitch – we blew a fuse the other day which took quite a few phone calls to Lainy our boat builder to resolve. I blame Ian for 'experimenting’ by running the washing machine when we did not have the engine on (hence pulling all the power from our batteries). He blames me for adding the coffee machine and possibly the toaster into the mix! Living 24/7 in a space less than 300 square ft for almost two months can occasionally make one or other of us a bit tetchy when things go wrong (or in my case when it rains -thankfully I have arranged a Mediterranean summer for our first few months of cruising!). But in all honesty we co-exist very happily 99% of the time and work pretty well as a team. Note the caveat - this adventure is not for those who crave their own space!
The biggest stress of the day is where we are going to moor each night – Ian had always said is was easy – basically anywhere along the towpath is fine. The challenge is that the Canal and River Trust have very little money to keep the towpath’s clear, and what few easy moorings there are, have often been snaffled early on (even before our early afternoon arrivals).

Top Moorings so far have included:

Right under Newark Castle, with the alleged ghosts just a step away across the water

Beautiful Bath

Central Bath, where we changed moorings a couple of times to enable us to stay for six nights in the middle of this beautiful city

Beale Nature Reserve on the Thames – very remote and beautiful with the ability to swim in the river - clambering back on board was rather more tricky!
Back at The Turf in
Oxford after 40 Years
Jericho in Oxford where we discovered that we were effectively moored in the middle of a Morse episode

Open Bar Theatre and The Taming of the Shrew

Reading (surprisingly) where we pulled up outside Bel & The Dragon to find that there was a Shakespeare troupe performing The Taming of the Shrew in their courtyard that evening.  I have always loved the play and Ian thought it could prove instructive!  We think we are lucky with a 7 minute walk back from the theatre in Edinburgh – this was 45 seconds! And the play was brilliantly acted by Open Bar theatre – a four person crew whose aim is to make Shakespeare accessible and fun

Mooring low points:
-       Right in the reeds outside Hungerford – the boat was overwhelmed by the foliage on the bank and we had to use a gangplank to get off the back onto the tow path; we think that a machete might be useful as this type or mooring has been rather more frequent than we would like on the Kennet & Avon
Porthole view
of the reeds
Finding ourselves floating in the middle of the canal when we had moored with pegs which had worked loose – at the time we were both on our iPads engrossed in trying to secure rugby tickets for the Scottish Internationals this winter (you know the routine – ‘there are 3486 people in front of you in the queue’ territory). Suddenly we heard five blasts of a horn. This is an emergency signal used for “unexplained object in the middle of the canal”. We looked out of the window to find this was in fact us, now floating sideways across the canal and blocking all passage. We are now rather more diligent about securing our mooring pegs in the ground. Thankfully it had not been the middle of the night

      So far we have had a few stay-aboard visitors including my Mum for two nights on the Oxford Canal, and Tom to assist us up the Caen flight.
Mum on the Oxford Canal
Mum excelled by only needing about 1.5 minutes in the shower and helping with the locks; Tom excelled by getting us up the main Caen flight in 2 hours 20 minutes; he did however need two showers as he also ran 10km up and down the flight before breakfast. Water conservation is crucial – we have a 500 litre tank which lasts us at least 5 days, and you become very aware of what you are using. On the energy side we have four solar panels which do an excellent job of topping up the batteries when we are not cruising. This effectively makes us energy self-sufficient, though with the current heatwave we do have to weigh up the benefits of more solar against the cool of shady trees.

Tom taking a rest
      The Caen flight of locks, 29 in total, and one of the longest in the country, was an interesting experience. We were very fortunate to get down the flight several weeks ago, when a short window of 3 hours opened up in the middle of a two-week closure. On our return, as well as collecting Tom along the way, we secured a prized mooring in the pound just below the main flight, meaning we would be first in at 10.00am the following morning. This means that all the locks are set in your favour (effectively halving the time it can take as you don’t have to empty them first).

We checked that the boat behind was willing to join us, though the lady on board was a little hesitant, concerned that an hour would not be enough time to get ready. How long does it take to pull on some clothes and do the 3 minute engine checks? All was explained when she emerged onto the towpath, looking as though she had stepped off the set of Abigail’s Party.  Long flowing dress, flip flops, bouffant hair, full make-up and as the next couple of hours unfolded a regular refrain of “OK Mikee?” to her husband who was steering. I was just waiting for the offer of a cheesy pineapple stick. Towards the top, we met a few boats coming down including an old oil-rig lifeboat, which was not dissimilar to a crude lunar return module with similar small windows designed for bobbing about in the ocean.
Spot the glamorous assistant on the left

Something I had not thought much about before we started is the incredible bird life - not something we are blessed with in Central Edinburgh. Sometimes you are so close it feels like being in a David Attenborough tv programme. We have watched the moorhens hatch their chicks which have grown much larger over the weeks. We cannot always tell a heron from a statue of a heron, so still do they stand at the water’s edge.

And we have seen so many swans including one on its nest with both eggs and chicks. The brown “ugly duckling” cygnets are slowly turning into swans as we cover the miles. A few more days on the K&A and we will turn towards London, back on The Thames. After the delights of Henley, Marlow and Windsor we have five days booked in Paddington Basin in the middle of August, a snip at £12 a night for luxury central London accommodation!  Hopefully it will prove a trouble-free (reed-free) mooring with the delights of London on our doorstep.