Pairing Up

Yesterday evening I went for a walk in the vicinity of our mooring at Weedon.  The sky was very overcast and the light had almost gone.  The only thing of interest was The Narrowboat Pub.

Several days ago the photo management software on the laptop became corrupted and my master disk is back in Australia.  I’ve been using the default settings in Live Writer and you observant readers will have noticed the inserted photos have been slightly too large.  I spent some time this afternoon attempting to fix that problem and (hopefully) the photos in today’s post are correct.  If not; I’ll do more fiddling tomorrow!

We were both up early this morning and on our way well before 7am.  CRT had sent an email advising Lock 12 would be closed tomorrow for more substantial repairs and we wanted to get up the flight before that occurred.  No boats were on the move that that time and we reached the bottom of the flight at 8.30am.  There was a Jules Fuel Boat already waiting to go up which made us second in the queue.  CRT have become more confident about the strength of their temporary repair as they allowed both us and the fuel boat into the lock.

 

You can see the blue and orange straps holding the left gate closed in the above photo.  The CRT employee informed me the repair plan is to lift the damaged gate up and insert a steel sleeve over the fractured timber support.  I can’t see them pulling it apart to do that and suspect it will be more likely they fit steel “splints” to the damaged section.

We paired up with the fuel boat for the journey up the flight.  Jan went ahead setting the locks whilst the crewman from the fuel boat and I completed the lock we were in.  At the top of the flight we stopped on the water point to top-up the tank whilst simultaneously doing a load of washing. 

After a brief boaters meeting, Jan and I decided to continue on to Braunston and look for a mooring in the pound near the Admiral Nelson pub.  This will allow us to wait out tomorrow’s forecast rain.

The cruise through Braunston Tunnel (1873m) was uneventful and we then went down four locks before finding a vacant mooring in the pound.  We have both the dot and DTV.  The pram cover is up and the sky is starting to blacken.