Autumn Cruise: Day 28

This was another day when we expected to get very wet, because the forecast was was rain pretty much all day.  And there was rain last night and early this morning.  But by the time we got up, it was fairly bright and the sun was even trying to come through.  We were getting ready to leave when a single boat came along, having come down the top two locks, so we got our act together and joined them.  It turned out to be a man who’d bought the boat as a replacement for a caravan at the Cosgrove Park, being helped to move the boat by his friend and his two sons.  With crew, it meant I could go ahead and set the locks ahead.

Even though we were catching up with a single-handed boat going down ahead, we did the five locks in about 45 minutes, largely thanks to each one being ready and open for the boats to enter.  At the bottom of the locks, we set off south.  It was sunny, warm in the sunshine, but very blustery.

We had intended to go back to the marina today, as Adrian needed to get a train to London and I had hoped to do a boat test tomorrow.  However for various reasons the boat test is postponed, so we sailed right past the marina entrance, went down Cosgrove Lock, and continued across the Wolverton Aqueduct.

Just before the Grafton Street Aqueduct there was a very heavy but thankfully very brief shower.  The rain hammered it down, but for probably less than a minute.  We turned around at the New Bradwell winding hole, where the boat always seems to turn very easily, and went back to Wolverton.  When we’d passed through, there hadn’t been a space big enough for us, but one of the boats there was coming the other way, so we knew there would probably be room to stop.  The boat was Tarporley from Camden, which has just had a nice new paint job at Baxter’s at Kingfisher Marina.

We moored up, made a quick visit to Tesco, then Adrian got a train from Wolverton Station to London.  I continued retracing our steps, mooring up beyond the aqueduct.  The last ten minutes or so were somewhat frustrating.  I’d caught up with a not-very-wide widebeam to such an extent that I had to keep going into neutral, and in front of that was a monster widebeam, which seemed to make a right meal of getting over the aqueduct, and then through the moored boats towards the lock.  Since mooring up I’ve done a few jobs, including tacking the oven shelves which we omitted to clean when we did the rest of the oven at Hanbury Junction, and trying to seal the bathroom mushroom vent, which appears to be letting in water.

11 miles, 6 locks.  (289 miles, 302 locks)