Day five

20 miles and 6 locks today - Phew!!

Left this morning at around 10.00 after a lazy start and headed towards Husbands Bosworth Tunnel. Much more traffic around today but fortunately most of it was heading in the opposite direction to us! A clear run through the tunnel, only passing one CanalTimeboat and then the 15 miles or so of clear and beautiful countryside cruising towards the Watford Locks and past Crick Marina where the new marina was a hive of activity.

It's a amazing how small the boating world is! During the summer, we kept 'leapfrogging' NB Everso from the River Weaver, all the way down the T & M and along much of the Shroppie. Today, we passed them again, twice! This time, they managed to pop their heads out of the front doors and we had a passing few comments about our respective travels. I'm sure our paths will cross again one day and hopefully it will be at a queue somewhere so that we can meet properly and get to know them!

Arrived at the Watford Staircase Locks at around five to four and found ourselves queueing behind 2 hire boats. With last passage at 4.15pm and Watford being the noisiest place on the entire system, we were a tad concerned that we might have to end up mooring for the night alongside the Watford Gap Service Station on the M1! Fortunately traffic was all in our direction and we were the last boat down for the evening with the Lockie locking the locks behind us.

We cruised on towards the turn at Norton Junction with the clouds increasing and the temperature decreasing and made the turn finally mooring up for the night at a nice little spot towpath side opposite good views of fields. A little noisy with the distant hum of the M1 but a convenient stop with the Braunston tunnel and locks to be conquered tomorrow before, hopefully, returning back to Brinklow Marina tomorrow evening in time for me to go shopping and prepare for our open day and evening barbecue on Saturday.

BTW. Sent my Ecofan off to be refurbished as it had stopped working last week. Today I recieved an extremely efficient and thorough test report telling me what needed to be done and informing me that the total cost would be around thirty five pounds. Not bad considering it needed almost everything replaced! They even said they would put on a reconditioned new blade FOC as it seemedto have been damaged severely in the post. I am very impressed so far and when I get it back, if it is as good as I expect it to be, I'll publish the details of the company on this blog.

****Added a new canal captions picture to my main Khayamanzi site****