Thursday 13 April 2017

Boating on to The Bratch

We had a good meal in the Oddfellows last night, though not a memorable one. It turned out to be a Marstons pub, but one of the better ones of its ilk, with a new menu that included some interesting rotisserie dishes. Sheila had the half chicken in mushroom and garlic sauce and was very pleased with it. I had a rump steak which was OK though "medium rare" was more like "medium". The beer was a bit pricey by our standards but that's about the locale, I guess.

Today we set off in good time and worked steadily down six locks, only being held up by an upcoming boat at Awbridge Lock, boating with its fenders down with the inevitable consequence. You can get away with it for a surprisingly long time but sooner or later there's a lock that's a bit narrower... In addition, the steerer did come across as a bit clueless. Having managed to back out, losing one fender, he tried powering in with the other still down and stuck again, of course, only this time even harder.

As we finally left the lock, at least Sheila was able to recover the first fender before it ended up round our prop.

We hadn't decided whether to work down The Bratch today, but when we got here it was still very cold and dank and threatening to rain, so we've stopped at the top. It means me doing ten locks tomorrow, but I quite enjoy the sequence of the Bratch oddity, then Bumble Hole, then the Botterham staircase.

My main moan today is the discovery that the "upgrade" of Pages on the Mac to version 5.5 is more like a crippling, reducing it to the functionality of this version of Pages on the iPad. In particular, the facility for bookmarking from one page to another via hyperlinks has disappeared, that being something I'd used heavily in the BOG Pub Guide. I'll now have to work out a way of editing the Guide in another app so as to put all those links back.

Aaargh!

Tomorrow, on to Greensforge.



Location:The Bratch

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