Boating time

We had an excellent session in the Black Star last evening. It's a very quirky pub with friendly, good-humoured staff and strong support from the locals. The food and beer are both very reasonably priced and of good quality. It's now a Wye Valley Brewery house and the Hereford Pale Ale went down very well indeed.

Sheila had an 8 oz rump steak whilst I braved the chicken fillet and bacon 'burger' with chips. Sheila finished off with crumble and cream – I was replete after my main course. All that and two rounds of drinks left me with change from £35, quite remarkable for this day and age.

This morning, we took our time getting going but were still out and about before nine.We walked down to the basin to dump a bag of rubbish and noted that there was room on both the water point and service wharf. So we nipped back to the boat and headed on down. By the time we got there, two CRT guys were working on refurbishing the services. One was painting the bollards whilst a chippie sorted some rot in the doors.

With their help, we managed to get tied to as yet unpainted bits of the landscape and started filling the water tank. It's not a very quick tap so it was well after half nine before we'd finished. In the meantime, I had checked in the Limekiln shop that the pump out and diesel would be available, and was assured that it would be. However, they were short handed today, so there "might be a bit of a delay" before someone came over – about 20 minutes, say.

Since we were still watching the water gauge crawling upwards, I said that that wouldn't be a problem, which with hindsight may have been a mistake. Various other boats came and went whilst this was going on and eventually we were ready to cross over to the service wharf.

I winded Sanity Again in the basin and tucked her over onto the back end of the lock landing over the other side as is the practice. In due course, one of the local moorers boated up and occupied a spare pontoon. He confirmed that "Josh" hadn't come in today, but someone would be here shortly, in "about five minutes".

About 15 minutes later, Rosie, a privateer we've been leapfrogging with for the past week or so, worked down the lock and tied in front of us, looking for diesel. So we all stood around and nattered about this and that, the state of the river, the joys of the Droitwich canals, the strange behaviour of other boaters, cassette versus pump out toilets...

Sometime just after eleven, the boss turned up and started on us. He left me filling the fuel tank whilst he got the pump out running. To be fair, it was a very good pump out, well rinsed and thorough. Prices are very reasonable here too, £14 for the pump out and 75 ppl for domestic diesel, any declaration.

Once we were all done, we had to hang about a bit as there was an Anglo-Welsh waiting to lock up and another boat coming down, so it was about 11.45 by the time Sanity Again was rising in the lock once more. We managed to get back onto the mooring we'd left three hours earlier, helped by the Anglo-Welsh boat shuffling up a bit.

Since then, boats have come and gone from here. We've made a first foray to Lidl for the start of a big restocking. More trips will follow tomorrow, as well as visiting some of the shops in town, I expect. We've not decided yet whether to leave on Sunday, Monday or Tuesday, we'll just see how long it takes for us to get itchy feet once more.

In the meantime, we're just looking forward to some quality time on a sunny weekend in jolly Stourport.