Voyage of the Spurvehog, 2024

 We had been contacted by Alice, one of the Trustees from TEABAG, the charity we help run in Ghana.  She is working as a carer at Treloars School in Alton and we had invited her to join us on the boat as she was off on a few weeks leave over the summer.  So she and a colleague, Madu, came and joined us for the day.  I promise that I had not said anything about the opportunity to relax in the front of the boat, or to sit and watch the world go by.  The two of them took charge of all the locks and I think enjoyed it!! They gave that impression anyway.  I met them on the bridge in Newbury - I had been to buy some food for lunch, and they were going to ring us when they got there, but as it happened they arrived as I was nearby, so that was very fortuitous! We did the first couple of locks together, and then they did the rest!!! Leaving Newbury by canal you come out into countryside quite quickly.  The river passes very close by and often joins the canal....

 Before we left Hungerford, I wanted to visit the specialist Embroidery and Haberdashery shop in the High Street.  That was quite an experience.  The man who ran it was a talker, and I made the mistake of asking a question about the other haberdashery shop in the town which elicited a long monologue about Grade II listed buildings, how inheritance can cause many strange things to happen to shops, and about his mother's skills at making a kneeler for the alter in the local church which was not blessed by the vicar, but by the Bishop, and how the Bishop had originally been appointed by his father, who's memory the kneeler was sewn in response to.  Need I go on?  Whilst I was in the shop another customer came, and identified the threads she wanted and bought them and left.  I think she had had a 30 minute chat on a previous occasion too and had been clear about her solution!!Anyway it was an interesting shop to look around!!  The canal route from Hungerfo...

 We didn't feel the need to set off very early today as Hungerford was only about 6 hours away. The first few locks were down an area of canal that was very weed full! Sufficiently so for us to have to stop in a lock to clear the weeds from the weed hatch! The canal water was pretty clear though, and you could see many many little fish about 3 inches long swimming against the direction I was travelling in. The reeds on the left in this picture definitely looked as though they should be cut back. We had got to a community called Great Bedwyn by lunchtime and wanted to stop to get some milk, so moored at the water point whilst I went to the village to get the milk. There were some nice houses in the village, but the Londis store was pretty depressing with not a lot of anything.  We stopped and had lunch whilst still moored at the water point - no one came by so we weren't really in the way.  It was a pretty bridge where we were, and the two Muscovy ducks seemed to see this ...

 When we started this morning we were three locks off the top of the route - the top pound of about 3 miles of flat water which included a short tunnel before we started the journey down towards the Thames level again. But before we get into that, I should tell you about the visit we paid to the church at Wootton Rivers and it's clockmaker, Jack Spratt. He was a well known maker of clocks and all sorts of contraptions and was born in Wootton Rivers and when he retired asked the villages for bits of scrap metal out of which he made the clock to celebrate the coronation of George V in 1911.  It was relatively recently restored and put back into the church and was just visible in the gloom. The first three locks are fairly close together, but don't really help you get in a rhythm for doing them. After you get to the top, there is a distance of less than a mile until you come to a short tunnel - 500 yards.  Unlike most tunnels we have been through, this one still has the chai...

 Today started with torrential rain.  A couple of day boats passed us about 10.30am with people on the back covered up in full waterproofs and trying to look cheerful.  The rain lightened about 11.30am and by noon it had more or less stopped.  So having had a very lazy morning, we set off.   We hadn't been going long when we came back to the swing bridge that had had the sheep and the goats in the fields next to it when we came past before.  There were none to be seen at all today! I wonder where they went!   Quite a lot of this bit of canal is very overgrown with weeds both sides.  There's not a lot of room to pass a boat, and certainly not a wide-beam of which there are quite a few along here. After a day of full-on locks, it's quite nice to have a day without too much to manipulate, and in fact at the next swing bridge there was a boat there before us so the lady from that boat did the bridge for us!  We passed Honeystreet too, w...

 We set off at about 9.15am and arrived at the first lock about ten minutes later.  There were 7 to do before we got to the Caen Flight proper, and the only other boats on the water were boats hired from Foxboat Marina which was just before our first lock.  We had negotiated that Chris would do the first 7 locks and then I'd take over so I was on the towpath to take a photo of us starting up the main flight.  I did the next 8 locks, the first 4 of which I did on my own.   For those of you who fancy an intellectual challenge, I have drawn a diagram of the process of doing a lock on your own.   By my calculation, you walk 10 lengths of the lock (6 on the left and 4 on the right), that's 700 feet, plus the width of the lock over the bridge 6 times which is about 120 feet, plus the distance to the next lock - say 200 feet, 3 times, 600 feet.  So the total distance one person walks around the lock when doing it on their own is 1420 feet - 473 yard...