And so to Mercia

It's been a day for some serious boating, and a pleasant surprise, weatherwise.

The forecast was for light rain this morning, becoming heavier after lunch; it's scheduled to be dry tomorrow, but with quite a bit of wind. We therefore decided to do the whole trip into Mercia today, since it's easier to cope with rain (just wear the right clothes) than with wind (not a lot you can do when the boat is blowing sideways).

The pleasant surprise was that the rain didn't arrive at all until after three, so we did the trip in quite easy conditions. As the steerer, I was particularly pleased.

/blur

Setting off at half seven, we stopped on the water point to put a bit more in the tank as Sheila wanted to run a washload as we went along. I took the opportunity to nip to the paper shop, and when I got back, the tank was half full.

So off we went again, having a very easy passage down the river section, which is quite low at the moment, running at about 1.5 mph. Most of the locks were against us, and indeed, some were left with the bottom gates open and the paddles up. We never caught up with whichever helpful sod character was leaving them like that, perhaps fortunately.

Lunch was taken on the move, and we arrived at Willington by half one. An hour later, we were tucked up in our berth in the marina (it's a fair distance from the village to the marina by water) and getting the boat back into permanent mooring mode. Sheila has tumble dried the first wash load, and has a second one on the go as I type this.

There are a fair number of familiar boats around, and a couple of new ones either side of us; leastways, one is very new, and the other is new to us, though clearly well loved for some time.

We'll take a couple of days to potter about, I suspect, not least because we're owed some proper lying in time…

/wahaha