Canine Water Transport

We’ve survived our first day of cruising with a pooch. It’ll take a while to get into a new routine, and to find out what we have to watch out for in terms of unexpected canine behaviour. As it happens, and nothing to do with Sally, the day didn’t go as planned from the outset, but all turned out OK in the end.

With around three hours cruising from Abingdon to Osney, and a target arrival time of 11 o’clock, we’d decided to start the day at six. This would allow Sheila to take Sally for her first thing comfort break whilst I made the tea, then we’d get up and breakfast as usual.

Sally could then have a long walk with Sheila from seven to eight before we started boating for the day. This bit went like a dream. I did some odd jobs around the boat whilst Sheila and Sally were out, then just after eight we set off upstream.

Arriving at Abingdon Lock, it all came unstuck when the lock wouldn’t work. It was on Self Service, of course, and since by now it was around twenty past eight, it wasn’t worth calling the EA helpline, since the lockie would be there at nine.

We hung about, giving the dog a bit of extra exercise, and the lockie and his assistant arrived on the stroke of nine, in the former’s case by walking out of the front door of his cottage by the lock.

When I told him of the problem, he walked up to one of the control plinths, pushed a button and it all functioned perfectly. He made some disparaging remark, and his assistant then worked us through.

Now we may be being paranoid, but, perhaps understandably, the lockies are very suspicious of the introduction of self operation, as they fear for their jobs. The guy at Abingdon is not one of Nature’s little rays of sunshine at the best of times, and I would not be totally surprised if he’d left the lock only half changed over, so that it appeared to be OK, but couldn't be worked by a boater.

Possibly unfair, but there you are. He certainly didn’t apologise for the fact that we’d been kept hanging about for 40 minutes.

Sheila steered up the river, and I spent a fair bit of time with Sally (in her buoyancy aid) in the well deck. She seemed to take to it OK, after some suspicious examination of the water streaming past, and showed little inclination to abandon ship, which is the main thing. We sent her below for the locks, which she didn’t appreciate, but we couldn’t take the risk of her charging about a lockside in a panic.

Time was getting on as we approached Iffley, and it occurred to us that stopping before Osney would be better from the dog walking point of view.

Accordingly, after a very smooth passage up Iffley, we pulled over beyond the first Rowing Club and tied on pins just by the Nature Reserve. When I walked Sally up to Folly Bridge later in the day, our wisdom in so doing was apparent; the moorings opposite Christchurch meadow were chocker, it being a sunny Sunday afternoon in July.

Tomorrow, we’ll amble on up river, stopping somewhere above Oxford.