A mixed day

Mostly, it's been a great day; we set off early again, and breakfasted on the move on a gloriously sunny morning. Steady progress was made all the way to Sutton's, where Sheila swung Sanity Again through the turn with just one reverse.

We lunched on the move as well, myself before we got to Boot Wharf in Nuneaton and Sheila afterwards. As indicated by Adam, they were very helpful and friendly at Boot, and we took just under 132 litres of diesel. The domestic price had actually gone down a penny to 89 ppl, and we were able to declare 30% propulsion.

After Sheila had finished lunch, she took over again, and things began to go slightly wrong. I was doing bow lookout as we approached Bridge 15, the one just before Marston Junction, and saw a bow enter the bridge hole as we got there. Sheila reversed hard and managed to pull Sanity Again up to a dead stop, but before she could get her moved over out of the way, the other steerer, who knew we were there from his crew in the well deck, just kept going.

[Edit: this actually happened before lunch, of course, as Marston is between Bedworth and Nuneaton; I'm just checking to see if you are awake at the back...

/wahaha]

His bow guard ploughed into our bow flash, scraping the coloured diamonds, whilst the crew just sat there and watched it happen.

I did my best to fend off, but two steel boats will win over flesh and blood every time. Heigh ho, hopefully we can get them touched in in September when we're up at Poynton next.

We've stopped on a lovely quiet mooring a bit beyond the Springwood Haven Marina. The tiller had been shaking quite a bit, so I popped down the weedhatch to see if we had stuff round the prop. Unfortunately, there was nothing there; the cause of the shaking is that we have a second, larger, ding in a prop blade. It means we'll have to get her docked as soon as we can, probably at Mercia; I'll give Justin at Aqua a ring in the morning to see when he can fit us in.

It probably means a new prop; I don't mind having one small bend knocked out, but two is a bit much. We'll see what he says once she's high and dry. At least she has a standard Midland Chandlers prop, so getting a new one is just a matter of popping into the chandlery at Mercia.

Two other things:

Overheard at Newbold yesterday evening from the steerer of a brand new 521xxx registered boat looking in vain for a mooring "There are just too many boats on the canals these days!" I don't think he was joking. This is a bit like sitting in a traffic jam complaining about all the other cars in the way.

I've tried turning off the word verification on the comments entry page. It means I'm seeing a lot of spam comments coming through, but so far the spam filter seems to be keeping them off the blog itself. It will make it easier for people to comment; the Captcha verification was getting more and more tedious.

Finally, a photo or three:

Coventry lurks on the horizon

Approaching Stretton Stop

Birmingham International must be busy, look at those contrails