Goodness me, day 31, a month since we left Banbury! I’m not going to bore you with locks & miles because I don’t know or care very much, but I do know we’ve had fabulous weather apart from two or three wet days, seen some great scenery and met some nice people.
We left Birdingbury Wharf on Sunday without so much as entering the Boat Inn (see, it was those people on Woodham who led us astray!). At Gibraltar Wharf we passed a number ‘historic’ boats including the tug Ruislip, which I really like the lines of. We ascended the three Calcutt Locks with another boat which we met along the way and made the right turn at Napton Junction.
Our plan was to get the Napton flight out of the way before it got too hot, the two boats who pulled off of the water point at Calcutt stopped for lunch at The Bridge so we thought we might not have to queue for Napton. Actually there were just four or five boats ahead of us at the bottom and once past the bottle neck of the damaged number 10 lock, where, apparently there had been a further ‘landslip’ the previous day, it was a straightforward climb to the top lock…
As we moored up for the last lock however, Catty decided she had had enough boating for one day and escaped into the hedge and despite attempts to bribe her back on board we had a cat-enforced early evening meal. After a two hour wait she sauntered back in at 7pm and we hurriedly went up the last lock as the water level in the pound we were in kept falling and we had no wish to remain there overnight, so it was a short hop to moor up near Priors Hardwicke where the blessed animal legged it again and didn’t come in again until eleven. Joy promised all sorts of punishment would befall the cat and that she would be confined to barracks tomorrow.
This morning we were away before nine as we hoped to bag a mooring for a couple of days at Fenny Compton and reckoned that by 11.00am most of the overnight moorers would have left. Don’t you just love it when a plan comes together? Here we are on a 14 day mooring if we so wish and guess what, Catty has been allowed out and is on ‘hedge-watching’ duty, strangely today she is staying within sight!???