The title is not comment on the weather, which was not sure what it wanted to do today, but at least managed to avoid raining on us. I’m talking about the training program for the new crew: seven locks and six swing bridges today. This is just to get them in shape for the twenty nine locks of the Caen Hill flight we are planning to do tomorrow. Greg and Karen did great, working the locks and keeping the boat supplied with blackberries.

I am reminded of a Kage Baker book, The Hotel Under The Sand, in which the heroine is washed up on a barren beach and survives by eating blackberries and raw clams. “It’s just like eating sushi,” she tells herself. What kind of benighted hipster sushi comes with blackberries?

We are moored in Sells Green again, close to the foot of the Caen Hill flight. There’s a rather boring pumping station that sends the water back up the flight of locks.

It needs a chimney and a steam engine, doesn’t it? What it does have though is electric motors, powered in part by an array of solar panels.

Technology marches on, and sometimes in the right direction.

Butterfly of the day.

Boat paint job of the day goes to this exercise in cultural appropriation.

That’s right, what the hell are those Native Americans doing riding horses? Horses were extinct in North America until Europeans brought them over.