Retail Therapy in Leighton Buzzard

Monday 2 July

It was a mixed night – Sheila slept well (mostly), but I was disturbed early on by some out of season fireworks, and then by folk wandering past on the towpath, talking. Objectively, neither of these events should have been a cause for alarm, but I’m no more rational than the next boater (it’s only the boat that’s called Sanity...). It must have been midnight before I dropped off, and then I was awake at six and couldn’t get back off. If we made more of a habit of mooring near town centres, I probably wouldn’t be so easily wound up, but there you are.

Typically, this was a morning we didn’t need to be awake early, as we wanted to get diesel from Wyvern before moving on. It turned out to be one of their turn around days, but they were very friendly nonetheless. It seems that they do weekly hires from Saturday to Saturday, and short breaks from Monday to Friday and Friday to Monday. This means that on Mondays and Fridays they try to turn the boats round between 9 and 11. At 56 pence per litre, they weren’t the cheapest diesel on the cut, but it was already doped with FuelSet, the anti-diesel bug additive.

Fuel tank replenished, we went on to the visitor moorings by Tesco, and in a series of trips bought engine oil from Halford’s, some groceries from Aldi and more groceries and some print cartridges from Tesco.

After lunch we made one final sally to Homebase and bought a new big Curver box to hold what’s left of the firewood over the summer, and the in-use bag of coal in the winter. They didn’t have any of the cheap rubber doormats we are looking for, but we have hopes of getting those at the mega-Wilkinson’s in Aylesbury.

The cunning plan is to use a bunch of these mats to completely cover the bow and stern well decks. At £1.99 for a 2 foot x 1 foot mat, it works out a good deal cheaper than the DriDek tiles (about 6 quid for a foot square tile) and works just as well. Admittedly, the DriDek tiles are available in a variety of shades, whereas the doormats are available in the same wide range of colours as the Model T Ford, but as we want them black, that’s OK. Note we can’t claim credit for this scheme – it seems to be the thing to do this year. In fact, the reason Homebase was out of stock was that they’d had a yachtie in a few days before who bought 32 of them. It makes our need for twelve seem quite faint-hearted.

All shopped out, we headed off up the cut, the intention being just to get clear of the town for the night. We ended up mooring above Grove Lock, and had a quiet afternoon and evening. I put the new print cartridges in the printer and it behaved itself once more. Motto, don’t buy cheap refill carts if you want quality photo printing.

Tuesday 3 July

It was a bright and breezy morning. Just as we were setting off, the Alvechurch Boat Centres boat Dudley Castle came up the lock behind. We proceeded to share locks with them all the way to Marsworth, mooring there at 12.50.

Dudley Castle isn’t in fact a hire boat, but is part of the Sunterra points based timeshare scheme. The people on board seemed very pleased with their deal, though when I looked them up on the web later, they seem to be no better or worse than any other timeshare scheme. That is, it’s very difficult to get any idea of the price without exposing yourself to some seriously high pressure selling, and there were a couple of websites run by disgruntled members.

I suspect that if you want to go the timeshare route to canal boating, you actually get a better deal from Canaltime, but that’s a purely subjective opinion on the basis of meeting and talking to people in both schemes, and looking at stuff on the web. Whatever else, if you want to try boating and haven’t yet, settle for a straight hire week or fortnight with say Kate Boats or Wyvern, (or Claymoore Navigation if you’re in the North) before committing to anything longer term.

The weather now looked quite thundery, so after a short walk, we battened down the hatches and entertained ourselves on board. It did indeed thunder, lightning and rain a lot over the next few hours. The weather forecast on the Met Office website is still not very encouraging, and there’s no sign of the River Nene reopening yet. We begin to wonder if we are going to make it to St Ives at all.