Macc was up quite early this morning at around 6.30, so rather than just taking him out for the loo I thought I’d take advantage of there being no-one in the recreation ground right next to the boat. I put his little blue light on his collar as it was still almost dark, and let him off the lead. At first he just scampered about a bit, but then had a fit of the zoomies, running laps round the fenced off playground area! Atherstone Locks are on restricted times at the moment and don’t open until 10. One boat came along yesterday afternoon and moored on the lock landing and another arrived after dark. Then a third came past at about 8am, so we knew there would be nowhere to wait if we moved forward after breakfast. Adrian walked into town again to see if he could find a better support for his wrist, which is still painful; then at around 10 I walked up to the top lock to see whether the flight had opened early; it had, as all three boats had gone so we quickly got moving before anyone else came along. There was a lot of work going on where the old hat factory used to be. There’s a dam in the water while they rebuild the wall. There’s a big development of housing association flats going in there.
We had a bit of a wait at the top as a boat was coming up the second lock and the top one was set for them. It meant I had time to do a couple of interviews for a podcast episode. It was about 10.30 by the time we could go into the top lock.
The second lock was ready for us and a boat was coming up the third so we could swap. There were lock keepers further down the flight who reset locks 4 and 5 for us. This part of the flight is very pretty.
There’s a long pound before lock 6 where people stop for shopping as it’s the closest to town. At the lock we caught up with the single-hander going down ahead of us, but there was also a boat to come up. In fact we met a stream of boats coming up.
Locks 6 and 7 are fairly close together, then there’s a gap before locks 8 and 9, and an even longer gap before locks 10 and 11. We met so many boats that it was only lock 11 that we actually had to turn for ourselves. Even with having to wait at some of the locks, we made it to the bottom in about 2 and a quarter hours, which is not bad going. The moorings at the bottom were empty, so we picked a spot to stop in.
After lunch, Adrian took Macc for a walk while I put together a podcast episode with the material I’d recorded today plus some other stuff. I quite like going from idea to completed project in a day! It’s been reasonably sunny today although also rather windy. We used about 1.5 per cent of our battery capacity coming down the locks on electric propulsion, and the sun has put most of that back in, which isn’t bad for October.
2 miles, 11 locks. (226 miles, 151 locks)