September Cruise: Day 18

It rained a lot all night and was still going this morning, sometimes very heavily.  Having looked at the rainfall radar, we waited for a lull and set off at 8.45.  Really, it was the sort of day when you wouldn’t move unless you had to; unfortunately we had to.

The first lock was full — and the rest of the flight turned out to be too full.  Because of the way these Grand Union locks are designed, there are no normal by-washes.  Extra water goes through the ground paddle somehow, and if there’s more it goes over the top gates and over the bottom gates.  The gates are different heights, so if there’s water going over the top ones, the lock will never make a level and you’ll never be able to get the gate open.  So from the second lock down, I had to run water off by opening top and bottom paddles, to lower the whole pound.  Of course each time this just moved the problem further down the flight, so there was a lot of running off water.  It meant the five locks took us an hour and a half.

It had rained again while we were locking, but once at the bottom it had stopped.  It was also pretty warm as we made our way along the five familiar miles back to our marina.  I saw a couple of kingfishers, and there were what looked like hundreds of geese at Grafton Regis.

The last mile had a fishing competition, but at least they weren’t fishing opposite the marina entrance, so I didn’t have to annoy an angler by turning in.  There was no wind, so my spin and reverse into our berth was one of my worst.  Then our next door neighbour came out to tell us that the marina owner, Roy, had unexpected died a couple of weeks ago.  He was 80, and the marina had been his project since retiring from his farm, which surrounds the marina.  He’ll be sadly missed as he would come down to check on everything at least once if not twice a day.

Adrian had done most of the packing as we came along, so we had lunch, loaded up the car and I headed home — while Adrian began the journey to Warrington for work tomorrow.

6 miles, 5 locks.  (215 miles, 137 locks)