It was a beautiful morning as we set off, having only seen a couple of other boats on the move we thought that it would be a quiet cruise being a Sunday. It wasn't long before that idea was blown out of the water as a constant stream of hire boats started to appear, some were quite a long way from their home base. Needless to say we found ourselves in convoys of up to 5 boats at a time and depending on the lead boat as to what speed we maintained, sometimes painfully slow.
Not your usual towpath walkers!
At the Braunston Turn we only had 1 boat ahead of us but as we negotiated the "T" junction we found ourselves having to merge in with boats coming from Braunston on our right. From the junction to bridge 90 the moorings were full and there were 2 boats on the BW service moorings restricting the channel to barely 1 boats width, just as well there were no wide beams about. With 2 oncoming boats and 4 boats heading North it was a matter of tactics to pass through the bottle neck until we cleared bridge 89.
The convoy continued all the way to Hillmorton locks where there was a sudden absence of South bound boats whereby the locks had to be re-filled each time before accommodating the next boat. Once through the locks we stopped and filled the water tank and the first rain of the day arrived so that was well timed. Even on this last leg of our journey we found ourselves 3rd in a 4 boat convoy all the way to Rugby.
The first ducklings we've seen this year.
As luck would have it we found N/b Kalimera on the towpath side of the canal and the mooring directly in front of them was vacant so we are now back together with our travelling companion's once more. Hopefully we will be under way again by the middle of the week and will get back into the old routine of not travelling on week-ends.
1054 locks, 1372 miles, 40 Tunnels, 41 swing bridges and 19 lift bridges since Nov 2006
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