Chilling out at Kingsbury Water Park

It's been a day for relaxing, birding and generally not doing too much. A couple of boats had moored behind us last night, one of them overhanging the winding hole, so when we noticed that they'd gone in the middle of the morning, we took the opportunity to wind Sanity Again.

This went reasonably smoothly, though the winding hole is only just big enough for a seventy footer, and the breeze was strong enough to influence matters, not necessarily in a good way. The use of the long shaft at the bow made all the difference; it was one of the situations where I was very glad to have the use of 14' of ash and Sheila rather than a bow thruster, which would have struggled to cope with the weed and mud in the hole.

We'd left the mooring chains in place, with fenders attached to them so that I could see where they were from a distance, so that Sanity Again was put back exactly where she started from, just the other way round.

By the time all this was done, and with the engine running we'd done already, the batteries were on 95% charge. I turned off the engine, planning to run it again this afternoon while I had my shower, but the sun has come out since lunch, and the odd 5% has been made up by the solar panel.

We've made two trips to the fixed hides, one early on and the second after lunch. The lakes are quite low, which may account for the comparatively limited amount of bird life visible. A local regular twitcher joined us this morning, and confirmed that it wasn't just us, there really weren't all that many birds about.

Nonetheless, we managed to record gadwall, cormorant, tufted duck, lapwing, oyster catcher and a possible shoveler (it was hiding under the trees) as well as the routine coot, mallard, mute swans, greylag goose and (of course) Canada goose. We also think we spotted a ferruginous duck, but can't be absolutely sure that it wasn't either a cross with a tufted or an odd tufted female.

Sheila was pleased to hear the local cuckoo at one point, but I've frustratingly not been able to catch it yet.

On our return from the second trip, we found an ex-Concoform marine hire boat, Londonweed, tied near us and partially across the winding hole, so it's just as well we turned round when we did. The rest of the time, we've been reading (in my case a copy of The Independent downloaded onto the Kindle, since there's no newsagent handy) and pottering.

Tomorrow, we make up for our indolence today; we want to be back at Huddlesford to rendezvous with Elanor in the evening, and need to get a pump out at Fazeley Mill on the way, so it's going to be a busy day by our standards.