Today we have travelled 4.5 miles and I have done my last 10 locks for a while, hooray! We are now on the River Severn at Worcester and the locks on here and the swing bridges on the Gloucester and Sharpness will be done for me.
Since leaving Sawley in April we have travelled 191 miles (including 44 miles on the Ashby Canal) and done 161 locks – large and small.
Today’s trip was fairly straightforward with only one of the locks needing to be filled before we could use it. We arrived at Diglis Basin in Worcester in about 3 hours and stopped at the facilities for water etc. While I was seeing to this Ken went off to the chandlery to buy a new shackle to attach the anchor rope to the anchor chain.
Where is the one you already had I hear you cry. Well, it’s gone the way of all things that we put somewhere so we will remember where they are next time we need them! We were only using it in April when we went on the Trent to Erewash but we can’t seem to recall where we put it after we took it off.
With that little job out of the way we continued to the Diglis Locks. A volunteer lock keeper was on duty here but this didn’t seem to make things run any smoother! After we started to descend the top lock another boat turned up so we had to wait in the bottom lock for them to come down with us.
Therein lay another problem because we were both then vying for space on the pontoon moorings. We were technically first but the chap on the other boat went and looked at the space and declared that if we squeezed up we could both get on there.
There were two boats already there, one right on the far end and one in an awkward position on the near end with a 20ft gap in front of him. The chap on the other boat said he was going to move this boat to the end but it was chained in the middle so he couldn’t move it.
Ken turned and went in first and got as near to the one on the far end as he could. In fact our fenders have formed a relationship! The other boat also turned and we just managed to get them in between us and the awkwardly moored one except their back end is nestled next to our front instead of next to the pontoon.
Since then a cruiser has occupied the space in front of the awkward boat so we couldn’t ask him to move up when he got back. Being this close has it’s downsides. One is being able to see straight into their bedroom (don’t go there!) and another is that at the moment they are stinking us out with their garlic laden cooking smells! Good job himself is having a little nap otherwise he’d be moaning! Still it’s only for one night.
After mooring ourselves and then helping the others to moor we went to town to top up our dwindling money and food supplies. And I had to top up my dwindling antihisthamine insect bite cream! Then we went to The Crown for a nice pint of Abbot, lovely.
Tomorrow we are hopefully going to moor on the river at Tewkesbury. We have moored on the Avon there but not the Severn. It will make a change from stopping at Upton.
