So as you’ll have gathered we did make it into Devizes after all by nightfall, and Margaret and I took shore leave to experience the bright lights and Bank Holiday nightlife in a low-budget remake of On the Town. In fact Devizes turns out to be lovely once you can tear yourself away from the Sainsbury’s, which was easy for us to do as they’d closed by the time we got there and we were freed up to be sternly…
The Caen Hill flight of locks is one of those feats of engineering like the Golden Gate Bridge or the Eiffel Tower where a particular type of technology was stretched to the limit and has an absurd beauty as a byproduct of engineering necessity. This is what they looked like when we were most of the way down, after several hours hard slog. We teamed up with another boat as these are double wide locks, and with Nick driving, and…
Totally idyllic “Wind in the Willows” style day yesterday (actually I’ve never read the book and have no idea what kind of river experience features in it). But instead of the mysterious green river overhung with trees from the previous night, we went through four locks and were into a sunlit area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, hawthorn hedges and rushes on either side, damselflies, and house martins skittering low over the water catching insects, and the odd thatched cottage and…
Nick has said it all really. Yes, I did notice what seemed to be an unusual amount of fumes coming from the engine room, and further investigation turned up a hose with one end loose. A couple of hours later Clive turned up, offered to murder a cup of tea as usual, and after some prodding declared the problem was a missing air filter, but as it had never been there in the first place it was probably not a…
A sunny Bank Holiday Monday’s cruise from the back end of nowhere where we were moored last night to the outskirts of the outskirts of Devizes. The original plan was to head into Devizes for a pleasant end-of-day mooching and mooring, but Andrew made the fatal mistake of letting me drive for the afternoon and Pegotty signalled her delight at this turn with a gay plume of smoke from her engine, which Andrew will tell you all about. Now we…
Today we made it to the summit of the canal, through many locks in intermittent rain. It’s so nice to have a large crew, it makes working the locks a lot more fun. On the way we stopped at Crofton pumping station. So far most of the locks were fed with water from the River Kennet, it doesn’t get up this high, so water has to be pumped up to the highest section of the canal. Though that’s mostly done…
So Margaret and I have been migrant crew for the low-skilled jobs on Pegotty for a day and a bit now, and have been doing the induction course in instalments. Last night we learned how not to sleep on a canal boat, which is most easily achieved by (i) failing to plan for night being colder than day and (ii) ensuring that your natural edge detection is disabled by lapping the topper over the futon on the side that slopes…
This is Mr and Mrs Snail. Snails are hermaphrodites, so they get to use both titles. If you think your sex life is weird, you should try being a snail during the mating season. Anyhow, he and she doesn’t go very fast, but he and she carries his and her home around with him and her. That’s pretty much life on a canal boat, apart from the hermaphrodite sex. Today we teamed up with another boat to go through the…
Tonight we are in Newbury, birthplace of John Gould, the man who saved the Kennet and Avon Canal. Inspired by Tom Rolt’s book Narrowboat, after WWII Gould went to work on the canal, first as an engineer doing repairs, and then setting up his own business as a carrier, with two narrowboats. There was not much demand for canal transportation in the early 1950s, but Gould brought salt from Middlewich to a Newbury laundry. Middlewich was the northern most point…
Today we bid farewell to the Thames, and made a right turn onto the Kennet and Avon canal. As you can see from the picture, we had yet to escape from the urban sprawl of Reading. Reading has redeveloped the canal front area with shops and offices, but unlike boater friendly towns like Banbury or Coventry, they have put a fence up next to the water and don’t want you to moor there. To be fair, this part of the…