Monday 16 June 2014

Grafton Regis



Here I am Rune
Distance 11.1 miles
Total 454 Locks 8 Tunnels
Running total mileage 619.2 miles

Moored for the night pretty much in the middle of nowhere, with just a lot of sheep for company. The nearest hamlet that I can find to our location is Grafton Regis so will use that as the headline since ‘middle of nowhere’ as a heading doesn’t really narrow things down much.

We’ve made good progress with over 11 miles, not that we’re in any great rush to get anywhere.  We were slowed down massively by a boat today. I accept that the whole purpose of travelling by narrowboat is to go slowly and appreciate the surroundings, this boat was somewhat overdoing the ‘slow boat’ sketch. Now whilst our boat travels at about 1mph on tickover and  I often don’t mind travelling that slow (remembering our time on the Kennet and Avon passing lines of moored boats) this boat was travelling at about half that speed. The result was that I was constantly having to knock the boat into neutral and drift otherwise I would run into the back of him. Being of an easy-going nature I was happy to do this for a while but after about 40 minutes during which he had not increased speed at all (despite there being no moored boats in sight) it was becoming a little trying particularly since I don’t believe that constantly putting the boat in gear and then knocking it out of gear again is good for the drive plates. Eventually, and totally against my nature, I had to overtake him. Overtaking on canals is not something to be taken lightly since it puts you onto the wrong side of the canal in the path of any oncoming boats and it is likely to take a lot longer than you anticipate. Eventually I found a stretch which was safe to overtake and began to do so. The other problem with overtaking on a shallow canal is that boat boats will draw the water which makes it even shallower but the overtake went ahead reasonably well although I was surprised to be totally blanked by the guy on the other boat. Normally canal folk are reasonably chatty and I thought perhaps he’d tell me that he had some problem with his engine/gearbox but no, totally blanked me as I passed. A small element of Karma was the fact that as my stern passed his bows it sucked them across towards us and as I passed he found himself drawn into the trees on the left side of the canal, obviously not very happy!! A strange event all round, but what occurred to me was that for us it was just a minor hiccup but for someone who has paid some serious money to hire a canalboat for a week, to be held up behind someone who chooses to travel at less 1mph could wreck their week’s travel plans, perhaps this guy didn’t think of that, or perhaps he just wanted to inconvenience hire boaters, who knows?

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