Ah bliss!! We’re back on the Kennet and Avon canal but this time we’re in a rented narrowboat for a few days after a brief handover session that didn’t quite convey the disconcerting slalom that such a long boat performs when the driver is a bit of a novice and oversteers. All the same, we settled down after the first 90 minutes and pulled over to moor up while the sun was still shining. The key to avoiding wild swerves seems to be to read the water resistance against the rudder through the tiller and not to overcompensate before the boat has had time to respond.
The internet signal, though not great, is good enough and the weather forecast is pretty awful so I can see some serious work on the database coming along. I’m slowly working through thousands of photographs of unidentified plants to see if any of them can be given reliable names and locations. Madame, after forty years of implacable resistance to the very idea of a narrow boat holiday has finally given in on the condition that she doesn’t have to do any work involving locks or swing bridges, so our youngest is our acting first mate and general muscle. The plan was originally to moor up at Dundas Aqueduct, but tea and home-made Dundee cake lured us to the bank and we feasted on some readymade paellas which burst into flames when we put them too close to the gas burner. We’re sandwiched here between the main road, a railway line and the river, so it’s all beguilingly muddled up because we can’t see anything except trees. Our first challenge of the morning is to get through a swing bridge that we gave an initial inspection before we closed the shutters on our first night. Our first lock is in Bradford on Avon and Madame is filled with dark forebodings but has kindly volunteered to make a video. I hope it will be very boring and won’t involve the Fire Brigade.
Everything is so slow on a narrow boat, you have to get your head into a different gear altogether. We are constantly overtaken by runners, swans, ducks, and even walkers, so our initial estimate of how far we’d get on this trip already looks wildly optimistic. We’re all looking forward to crossing the two aqueducts. There’s a decent pub next to Avoncliff if I remember correctly but Madame thinks it may be closed. The second, at Freshford is closed on Mondays and Tuesdays so the First Mate is relying on bottled cider. We spotted our first Kingfisher near the pub at Bathampton.
Canals are invariably marvellous. When we lived in Stoke on Trent for a while it wasn’t unusual to see dead dogs floating between the supermarket trollies. Here, though, there is botanical interest everywhere -not so much in the autumn – but in the early spring flush there are all sorts of plants that would have been harvested by the barge people as herbal medicines.
Anyway, more (and hopefully more photos tomorrow) I can feel an early night coming on.