Space station

 

Sunrise from our mooring at Grafton Regis,and with fog in the valley it doesn’t get much better than this . We pulled pins at 08.40 and headed towards the Stoke Bruerne flight of locks.

Arriving at the locks we were met with this view of water cascading over the bottom lock. It was something that we have never seen before on this flight. We pulled in on the services and filled with water while watching two boats coming down the lock. The first boat was pulled out of the lock as was the second one. The guy said that both boats had broken down and he was going to wait for an engineer at the bottom. He also said that three of the pounds were a bit low ,so he had left the top gate paddles on those locks open. Alarm bells immediately rang as that is something you would never do.

As we proceeded up the first locks we soon came across empty pound and open paddles. With a boat coming down and us going up Carolyn and that crew had to go back up the locks and start letting water down from the top. We tried to get out of the lock in the picture above before the pound was fully filled and got stuck on the lock cill.

After a bit of a delay Carolyn soon got us sorted and on our way up the flight. When we reached the top a Canal and River Trust guy turned up and said he had been called out because there was a report of low levels on the lock flight. Carolyn explained to him what had happened and that it had now been sorted by a few boaters.

After a longer than expected trip up Stoke Bruerne locks it’s then a short cruise to Blissworth tunnel . It is usually a wet passage through and should take us about 35 minutes.

We passed one boat coming in the opposite direction. In a tunnel you should always have your tunnel light aimed up towards the roof of the tunnel so you don’t blind oncoming boats. As you can see this idiot boater has his pointing straight ahead and this is our view. When this happens and it often does I just try and look down the right-side of the tunnel wall and try and keep in as tight as possible.

No leaves but plenty of Apples left on this tree.

On our mooring at Weedon and we heard on the radio that the Space station was flying over the top of us . I grabbed the camera and got this amazing picture of a dot in the sky as it whizzed over above us.

Tomorrow we are meeting Ryan on his coalboat to get a bottle of gas and we will also top up with diesel and coal to see us through Christmas. It’s then up the Buckby flight of locks and hopefully we will be able to pick up a mooring at the top.

                                                                                                                     Happy Days