Saturday, July 07, 2012

Friday and Saturday - days 9 & 10

Friday
“the canals are unlikely to be in much danger” were my last words in my last post. I was wrong.

I have been hugely impressed by the Tweeting of The Environment Agency, who have been keeping followers fully apprised of the flood warnings and alerts around the country. (At 6.30pm today, they had 138 flood alerts and 54 warnings in place!) But it was the website Waterscape which informed us yesterday that the River Trent - a few days north-east of where we are - is flooding, and that an adjoining canal lock is closed through which we need to pass in order to continue our journey. Of course, there is no saying when it might be opened again. If we were to continue, we might find the problem has gone by the time we reach that point. We might find it is still closed, and have to wait any number of days for the flooding to subside.

In the light of this news, we have decided to cut our journey short, about-turn and return to the marina. We still have the license problem to sort out, and the generator to get fixed (see recent posts for both), and we do need to be accessible to Colin so he can fix our failed thermostat. It seems the most sensible thing to do is to return to Yelvertoft, get all of the problems sorted out, and then complete the Leicester Ring by going the other way around it, and taking in the GU Welford Arm, the GU arm to Market Harborough, the Ashby Canal and the arm of the Coventry Canal which terminates in Coventry itself.

We don't see this as any kind of a failure, nor even much of a disappointment. It's simply being pragmatic.

So, tomorrow, we drive up the the nearest winding hole, and start on our way back.

Oh – and today, it rained. 24 hours of solid, heavy rain until early evening, when we were treated to blues skies and sunshine. Weird stuff, weather!

Saturday in one sentence!
We had good weather today, so we cruised up to Nuneaton, weren't impressed, bought some supplies, turned around at the White House winding hole, past Wood Bridge 27, and headed back past the spot where we had moored overnight, on to Hawkesbury Junction, back onto the Oxford Canal, and are now moored at a quiet spot for the night.




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