In the rain to Leighton

Saturday 30 June

We made one of our relaxed starts to the day on a mild but wet morning. Reading the Waterways World Guide for the GU (South) led me to discover a small but good shop about 5 minutes walk from Bridge 106. The weather was clearly planning to be wetter rather than drier, so we decided not to move today. This proved to be a good decision, as during the morning it not only rained a lot, it got so cold that we lit the stove by lunchtime. The afternoon promptly warmed up, needless to say, so that we had all the doors and windows open by tea time and were sitting round in our shirt sleeves.

Sheila did a wash load while the engine was doing its battery charging duty, and after lunch we had a walk along the towpath to the Three Locks at Soulbury. On the way back we spotted some odd little ducks swimming in the cut. They were the right size and shape for mandarins, but were nothing like as colourful. I wondered if they were either females or else juveniles. We didn’t have a camera with us, apart from the phone, so I took some shots of them with that.

Back at the boat we had a cup of tea, and I uploaded the photos. Comparison with our bird guide confirmed our suspicions; they were juvenile mandarin ducks. No sign of the parents, but they may have been on the River Ouzel which flows very near the canal at this point.

Earlier in the day the Vispa internet service had been playing up again, but after tea it was back to normal. Sheila did the financial stuff she does at every month end, and I did the blog. There’s still a mood of hanging about, but in this summer of fierce weather we are well aware that we are getting off comparatively lightly. The canals list email group and the towpath telegraph are full of tales of people having their holidays written off by the rain and the closed rivers.

Pork chops for dinner, and another peaceful night.

Sunday 1 July

Good grief, the year is half over already! It was really sunny at six in the morning again, and we loafed around a bit, as it’s not far to today’s destination, namely this side of Leighton Buzzard. We don’t want to go past the Wyvern hire base until tomorrow, as we need to fill up with diesel.

As soon as we set off, it started raining, and indeed it was as heavy as we’ve seen it for a bit. It was particularly bad as we worked up the Soulbury (or, if an old boater, Stoke Hammond) Three Locks. We hung around at the bottom filling the water tank and then just lurking, but no one showed up to share the locks, so we did it by ourselves. Working up a broad lock with just one boat is for us the most tedious aspect of locking, as you can’t let the water into the chamber very quickly or the boat gets flung about something awful.

In the rain it’s worse, as it’s not safe for the steerer to get up on the roof of the boat to hold the centre line, so almost all of the work falls on the one on the bank. This happened to be Sheila today, and as we plodded up the locks and she got wetter and wetter, her expression became more and more, erm, determined. Having got up the locks and set off along the Jackdaw Pound to Leighton, the sun came out, of course, and the roof of the boat was soon quite dry, though the seat of Sheila’s shorts took rather longer.

Approaching Leighton Lock, we spent a bit of time dodging canoes full of enthusiastic youngsters. Mystique was just getting ready to enter the lock, so we shared up with them and moored at the top. I made a quick foray to Tesco to get a paper (regular readers will by now have realised that my digestion is severely impaired if I can’t read a paper with my lunch) and we got something to eat.

After lunch we took a stroll round town. On previous visits, we’ve always just tied on the shopping mooring outside Tesco, and then shot off to somewhere quieter for the night. This time we had an opportunity to appreciate this pleasant little market town, though it was very quiet in the Sunday afternoon sun (and showers).

Back at the boat we felt quite weary after our exertions. A cup of tea helped, and I did the weekly IT housekeeping, backing up the data files to the external drive, updating ClamXav, the anti-virus programme, and running an update to the OS, since I had a good fast connection. If I was using a Windows machine I would want to update the anti-virus every day, but the risk to a Mac is so much lower that a weekly update feels safe enough (there are NO viruses in the wild for Mac OS X).

The late afternoon and evening was enlivened by sundry Wyvern boats shooting past on their way to the yard at the end of their holiday, and by Ocean Princess, the famous ocean going narrowboat, which didn’t slow down a whole lot either.