Tuesday, September 30, 2014

A sunny weekend

There followed another two days of lovely weather, although both were dull and cooler to start with, shedding the clouds and the chill by noon. But it's lovely weather for boating!




Moving on on Saturday morning, we caught up with NB Annie just before bridge 28, as she paused mid-channel, a CRT working boat unpinned and at 90 degrees across the canal in front of them. I jumped off Kantara to help the man try to pull the boat back to the bank, but there was only a metre of rope at either end of it, and we failed. The lady at the tiller of Annie moved her forward slowly, and pushed the CRT boat's stern aside, aligning it pretty much parallel to the bank, and on the other side from the towing path. Annie carried on into the top of Bascote staircase locks. Grace now tried to use Kantara to push the unmanned boat across to the towingpath side of the canal, so that I might re-pin it, but the boat's weight proved too much for Kantara, and she had to give up, and drove on into the lock next to Annie. I phoned CRT and reported the problem.

There were two hire-boats in front of us; they'd passed us as we were taking on water at Fosse Wharf, and both helmsmen demonstrated little competence at controlling the boats. Perhaps one or both had passed the moored CRT boat too fast, and un-moored it. In fairness, though, the bank were it had presumable been moored was very soft, and not really fit for mooring pins.


Bascote Locks

We went down Bascote and five more locks with Annie, and the three crew were good company. We parted with them just before bridge 35, near the village of Radford Semple, where we moored for lunch.

  

Afterwards, we walked out to look at the village church which we could see from the canal. Unfortunately, though, it was locked, with the organist rehearsing inside.





We stayed the night where we were moored.

On Sunday morning, we moved on to Leamington Spa, where we shopped for food.



After lunch we set off for a pleasant mooring past bridge 49. The towing path was very busy with walkers, joggers and cyclists, but the canal remained very quiet. We had to moor with pins, and were a bit concerned about their security in the stony grass verge, so we triangulated the moorings fore and aft (four pins) and kept our fingers crossed. The weather remained very warm, and sunny.




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