Hitching crows and nice marinas

With only the short haul to Great Haywood to do today, we gave ourselves the luxury of a lie in, and didn’t set off until half eight. As forecast, the day was overcast and very cool, but still with little wind and no rain, so no complaints.

There were no surprises in store, until, that is, we got below Hoo Mill Lock, when a carrion crow flew up to the bow and perched on the top of the cratch. We have had the odd duck on the roof from time to time, of course, but this is the first time we’ve seen a corvid hitch a lift. I rattled one of the centre lines, and it flew off into the hedge.

The moorings here at Great Haywood are very busy above the lock, with what looks like a lot of potential winter lurkers staking their claims, with an admixture of passing though boats, including Braidbar 61, Shiraz. We’ve managed to squeeze in on the very end, just above the lock landing; we didn’t want to lock down, as the mobile signal reception down there is awful.

After lunch, we strolled round to the marina, to check up on the arrangements for our winter mooring. As expected, they were very welcoming, and we were able to see the place where we will be stopping. If you can divide marinas into shiny boat ones and scruffy boat ones, GH is clearly at the former end of the spectrum, but that's fine with us.

We won’t be allowed to store bags of coal on the roof, but don’t need to if we’ve got access to a supply anyway. The WiFi service is marina wide (some of them only provide it near the office building), and is about average in price, very like the O2 PAYG deal in fact. Whether we use it depends on how the 3 connection turns out, and how much traffic we get through in the winter.

A query to the canals-list produced a helpful response from Andy Greener about things that appeared on my firewall log. He also recommended a neat piece of software for the Mac called Little Snitch, which acts as a firewall in the opposite direction, telling you when one of your applications has decided to ‘phone home’, as they say, that is make a silent connection to the net for reasons of its own.