Lovely Canal

A surprise this morning when we awoke to find the domestic battery bank at 50% SOC (state of charge).  Normally it’s 80% and I don’t think we have ever had the batteries this low.  However our heavy traction batteries can go as low as 30%, so we won’t have damaged them. But I did wonder what had caused them to deplete so low.  Did we have something running during the night?  Was there a problem with one of the batteries? Had the recent 240Vshorepower recharging not done a particularly good job?  Or had the charger done a great job and recovered some of our lost capacity and confused the Smartgauge?  I don’t think it’s the latter.  Today I carefully watched the Victron BMV600 monitoring the amps flowing into the batteries.  At the end of our cruise I turned the 12V circuits off and watched the Victron to see if we had an electrical leak (we didn’t).  Looks like I’ll be watching it for much of the evening.

It’s been a lovely cruise today heading south down the Stratford Upon Avon Canal. I went for an evening walk yesterday and took a photo of Lapworth Junction.

Today we passed a number of those lock keeper cottages with their unique barrel shaped rooves.  After seeing so many other bloggers photos it was good to finally see this ourselves.

Jan did some of the steering today and made a better first effort than I did.  Towards the end she even took Waiouru into a few locks.

I happened to notice the wording on this canal side bench seat.

And what about this for a wind up jukebox

Actually I thought it was a clever and low cost way of providing tourist information.

The other interesting feature this canal has are the splits in the bridges which would have allowed the horse to walk around the bridge without having to unhitch the tow rope to the boat.

We turned the bend approaching Preston Bagot Top Lock to see a boat exiting.  They crew kindly left the top gate open and then loitered in the lock approach allowing us to pass a line of moored boats.  Then as we passed by the lady at the tiller mentioned she reads this blog.  We did express our usual surprise suggesting there were better things to do with your time than read this tat! 

In this short timeframe I forgot to take a photo until nb De Nada had passed so a rather poor stern photo.  Thank you blog reader and happy cruising.

The domestic batteries were back to 100% so we moored for the night above Preston Bagot Bottom Lock.  There is no Three mobile voice signal here and a very intermittent data connection so it may take some time for this post to publish.