An extra day in Aylesbury

Friday 6 July

It was a very windy night, which gave us to wonder about the wisdom of going back up the Arm today. On my way out to get a paper and stuff from Morrisons, I stopped to chat to Max and his wife (sorry – I said I had a bad memory for names) on Painted Lady and Roy and Carol on Banbury Blue (well, three out of four isn’t bad, I suppose). Turns out we are all continuous cruisers, hanging about waiting for the weather to improve. The forecast is actually much better for tomorrow than today. Max got as far as disconnecting his shoreline, but then was seen putting it back. We decided to sit tight for another night.

Looks like it’s going to be a lazy day. I spent a fair bit of time just idly surfing the web and catching up on various other blogs. I’ve just discovered the delights of Google Reader, that lets you keep track of blogs and other sites with an RSS feed. Andrew Denny on Granny Buttons had some interesting comments on blogging in general, which he sees as an email to the world. I know what he means, though to me this feels more like a humorous column (well a column, anyway). My main aim, apart from entertaining whoever reads this stuff, is to give a flavour of what this life is like. As well, of course, as parading my various prejudices without the restraint of an editor.

In the afternoon I popped out to get a copy of this month’s Canal Boat (datelined August – why do magazines have this weird habit of claiming to be a month ahead of themselves?) It has a picture of Braidbar 100 on the cover, and a stunning review of it inside. The whole mag has been revamped with new columns and a bit of typographic redesign, and is an improvement, not that it was that bad before.


Saturday 7 July

Definitely a morning for boating, bright and sunny, with much less wind. Painted Lady set off at 8.30, and we weren’t far behind, in fact we caught them up at the first lock. We saw people moving around on Fulbourne, the unconverted working boat that’s owned by a group of wrgies. Tried waving to them as we manoeuvred out of the basin, but they didn’t see us, being very focussed on taking off her top cloths.

After a short stop at Tesco we worked steadily up the flight until by midday we were just above lock 11, where we stopped for lunch. Bits of this arm are heavily overgrown with reed. I took some shots of it:

According to the ACS mag, they get nearly as many boats down here as pass by on the mainline, so why doesn’t BW take more care of the track? As well as the reed, it’s quite overgrown in places, and the towpath is a morass of hummocky mud in places.

Last time down here we used the bike in the flight, but as Sheila nearly went in the cut once on the way down, and I had two narrow escapes on the way back up, we didn’t bother this time. We did see some hardy souls on full blown mountain bikes, but of course under these conditions, it only meant they were cutting the path up even worse for the rest of us. One positive - we saw and heard a bird we tentatively identified as a Reed Warbler, but there are so many warblers shown in the guide, I wouldn’t like to swear to exactly which species it was.

We passed Painted Lady just above Lock 9, but decided to keep going ourselves. By three we were coming up the final staircase pair, and had moored by 3.30. After all our exertions (16 locks is a fair days work in our view) we did a certain amount of creative slumping. The forecast is even better for tomorrow, so we’ll probably move on again. We’ve decided to use the next fortnight to work back to Braunston in leisurely fashion, before arriving back at Gayton Junction around the 18 – 20 July, assuming the Nene has reopened by then.