Monday 28th October
Well, that was a bit of a non event, we had heavy rain over night but the winds were lighter than they had been all week! Watching the forecast for the hundredth time before we went to bed last night we saw the reporter at Cardiff Bay (just across the Severn from here) saying it was due to hit them at 1 am, 90 mile an hour winds were expected, blah, blah, blah and braced ourselves for the worst.
I woke up at 2 am and listened in the darkness ……. there was absolute silence, no wind, no rain, nothing. It’s not here yet then I thought and went back to sleep. I woke again about 4 and it was raining but still no gale force winds. And there never were, we were lucky it missed us all together. All our battening down proved to be unneccessary.
This morning it looked ok so, as we had been at Rea Bridge nearly a week, we decided to move. During the morning there were a couple of heavy showers, one notably just as we were about to set off, but there was also some lovely sunshine in between. We stopped at Sellars Bridge to get water and get rid of our rubbish mountain then carried on to Saul and moored about half a mile from the junction.
While we were travelling I phoned BWML at Bath to enquire about the possibility of us having a winter mooring at Victoria Basin in Gloucester Docks. We were there the other day and had a chat with the Vice Commodore of the boat club there and he seemed to think there was a vacancy. We had been going to spend the winter in Saul Marina but after some consideration we decided it may be a bit isolated for us there. There is a vacancy in Victoria Basin so we are going in there on 9th Nov.
With that sorted I phoned Peter Hawker, the coal merchant, to arrange for a delivery. He can come to Saul on Thursday which is ideal for us as the bridges are closed until then and we can’t go anywhere anyway. We will be able to move nearer the car park on Thursday morning before he arrives. I have ordered 10 bags of Stove Glow which should keep us going for about 5 weeks unless we get a really cold snap.
After we moored up I sorted the fire out (as I usually do) and as I was doing so I said to Ken that it must be like having central heating for him as I always did the fire and he didn’t have to worry about it because it was always warm in the boat. He said yes he had got an old boiler! Bloody cheek and that on top of yesterday’s remarks about the washing machine!
After I had bashed him we had a nice walk to Frampton in search of some eggs. We found some outside one of the cottages but realised we hadn’t got the right sort of change from the shop after we bought the paper and we had forgotten to bring any change with us so we couldn’t buy them, aaargh! I had an idea I would go back after we had been in the pub and got some more change but it rained so I didn’t bother, we can get some tomorrow.
So we will be here for a couple of days now until the bridges open again on Thursday.
