North West Passage: Day 2

We are on a bit of a mission this weekend, and fortunately I'm in the habit of early starts this week, so I was up at 6 and set off at 6.45. Adrian stayed in bed a little while longer. It was a lovely morning -- chilly but bright.

It took the expected time of just over four hours to get to the bottom of the Buckby Locks. The only slight delay was that just after the massive earthworks for the new Flore-Weedon bypass, there was a clunking noise and the tiller became very hard to move. I pulled over, at which point whatever has caused the problem seemed to fall off; I had a poke about with the pole and down the weedhatch, but couldn't find what the problem had been.

At the locks, we shared the bottom one, but they had friends waiting at the next one, so we were left alone. I wasn't too disappointed, as they were borrowing the boat and had little idea what they were doong, but it did make for a slow ascent. There was also quite a bit of traffic coming down, so there was a fair bit of waiting around. It was a lovely sunny warm day, so not much of a hardship. We've done this flight so many times I took few photos, except of a butterfly.

At the top lock I chatted to some people on the last leg of the London Ring, returning to Blisworth. We turned left towards Braunston at the junction, and had lunch on the move before the tunnel. We passed lots of boats on this stretch, including Ryan on Southern Cross, and in the tunnel we passed three more almost immediately. That end of the tunnel is very uneven, and each boat seemed to be at a kink. Two of them had nav lights, and I realised how much easier it is to judge where boats are when they have them.

As we got to the top lock, two boats were just going in to go down. We'd arranged to meet Catherine, Nigel, Grace, and Matthew -- who only got back from two weeks on their share boat, Rowington, yesterday, but always seem up for a bit of locking. There had been no-one visible behind us in the tunnel, so we eventually set off alone; once again it was slow going, with all the traffic down hill. Another boat started to come down the top lock, so we said we'd wait for them in the second, but then another boat joined them off the moorings, so we went ahead ourselves.

At the bottom of the locks, we all had an ice cream from the shop, then we gave the family a little trip down to the junction. Along the way we passed Waterway Routes, and had a quick chat with Paul. After we dropped off Catherine and co, we had an interesting few minutes. Through the road bridge, where it's pretty narrow anyway, there's a burnt out Sea Otter at the start of the moorings, then a couple of old boats usually seen in the Rugby area were being hauled along the outside of the moored boat, followed by a hire boat. We reversed a bit to get out of the way, then another boat came along after we'd set off again, which meant a visit to the offside bushes for us. After that, the canal was pretty quiet and beautiful.

We carried on as it was a nice evening, right the way to Hillmorton. We stopped before Bridge 72, just in case there wasn't room after it. We'd been on the move for almost exactly twelve hours, but by turning off the engine during the longer lock waits, we had only 10.9 hours on the engine.

24 miles, 13 locks. (33 miles, 20 locks)