Another FUN day's boating

Yes, boating is fun. A little and often is quite acceptable. We squeezed in a day's boating today between our weekend: Church, Banbury Canal Day, a trip to Kent fr a grandchild's baptism etc. and tomorrow: exercise class, hosting  a "Christians Together " lunch and a trip to Cardiff to take our son's bike, speaker cabinet and a few odds and ends required at Uni.

SO relaxing on the boat was a great thing to do. We took Sue the Crew with us and bussed form Hillmorton to Newbold-on-Avon to join the boat. We set off just before 12.00noon and cruised fro about an hour before our first incident of the day at Bridge 69. There was a boat moored towpath side on the other side of the bridge and another boat was coming toward us. This moved over to the starboard to give way to us bit as we passed through the bridge hole the bow veered over toward the moored boat. No time for a horn signal just full stern and bang! There was no way of avoiding the collision. We ricocheted into the moored boat. The helmsman on nb Dipper, the moving boat, was shaken up and apologetic but he had been caught by his hood in the tree that was on the off-side. He was lucky not to be dangling over the drink! He showed us that his hat was floating in the water under the tree. We backed up,got the fishing net off the roof, retrieved the hat and re-united it with its owner.

We stopped for lunch just short of the locks and it started to rain just as we were ready to go on. We donned wet weather gear and decided to boat on.

At Hillmorton Lock No 3 we were met by a nice voluntary chap. He emptied down and opened the bottom gate for us with the bad news that only one side of the paired locks were operable and the good news that no boats had gone up since the last he'd helped through so all should be set for us. Our crew stepped forward and walked ahead to open up the next lock. However, as we nosed out of lock 3, the crew of nb 19th Hole scampered about to release their mooring lines from the lock landing bollards where they had been lunching and set off, very slowly, through the bridge hole of Bridge 71 ahead of us! Not even a "thank you" to our crew as they entered Lock 5. I had plenty of time to send my appraisal of the situation to "Narrowboat Moaners and Ranters" group on Facebook! By the time I was waiting for Lock 7, which they seemed to be doing very slowly with a bottom paddle left open, I had three comments agreeing with my view that this was very bad manners.

Still by now it had stopped raining!

We moored on the Visitor mooring above the lock.
                                                                                                     4 miles, 3 locks, 3 hours