Harvest thought

Piglet and I needed to move today. We took the boat down to the water point and breasted up to Oasis Too who was watering as well. This was one of the boats that had an unfortunate mishap last July when she was stranded across mud bar above a weir on the River Avon after the dramatic rise on water levels tore her from her mooring. Obviously and fortunately there was no permanent damage.

We went on south to turn at the winding hole above Nell Bridge Lock and have lunch there to return in the early evening. The weather was wonderful today and we enjoyed being out in it. Piglet steered the boat at the locks and I did the lock wheeling. There was surprisingly very little traffic on the canal. We enjoyed the birds: kestrel, buzzard and cormorant were spotted along the way. Anglers were checking out the grass snakes that often take to the canal in the hot weather, rather than their catches.

One striking thing was that it was this week of the year that we had the incident with a lift bridge that had been left down because the harvest was coming home. You can see from the photos that the harvest of both corn and rape is not started in the fields along the canal in this part of the county. The weather recently has obviously been too bad to harvest the crop. We need some fine weather, not just for boating but to get the wheat into the barns or, no doubt, we will see another sharp rise in the price of bread!