Monday, February 09, 2015

Breaking the ice

Yesterday, a number of us moorers were astonished to discover how thick the ice in the marina had become. Two boats had to leave their moorings to visit the service platform. The first we knew of their movements was when Kantara was rocked quite hard to the accompaniment of loud cracking noises. We hurried outside to find a narrowboat heading fast towards the platform, breaking the ice as it went. The sheets of ice from which the pieces were breaking were being driven aside, and consequently pushing moored boats around, some of them quite violently. It took the skipper of the boat quite some time to moor at the platform. Even when he was alongside and a metre or so away, the pieces of ice which had floated into that space were preventing him from getting any closer. They had to be broken or pushed out of the way with a pole.





The ice was over an inch thick.



Once moored, he was there for some time. Meanwhile, Phil from next-boat-but-one to us had backed his boat out, benefitting to some degree from the space in the ice the other guy had created. Nonetheless, he still couldn't avoid pushing one major floe aside, which then struck hard against moored craft. I think the owners wouldn't have been too pleased if they'd been on board, but there was no way of preventing it short of having a team of navvies with axes to break it all up.




Last night and today have been much milder, beautifully sunny and bright again, and the ice is disappearing fast. A bit of a shame really.

We went this afternoon to see "The Theory of Everything", an astounding film.
  1. "In the 1960s, Cambridge University student and future physicist Stephen Hawking (Eddie Redmayne) falls in love with fellow collegian Jane Wilde (Felicity Jones). At 21, Hawking learns that he has motor neuron disease. Despite this - and with Jane at his side - he begins an ambitious study of time, of which he has very little left, according to his doctor. He and Jane defy terrible odds and break new ground in the fields of medicine and science, achieving more than either could hope to imagine."
  2. We missed seeing "Into the woods". It finished at the cinema yesterday. Sigh.

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