A disappointing day.
Richard and I had a rough night.
We both woke up about 2am – him as he had a sneezing fit and me, well
his sneezing fit woke me up too. At 3am
we were still awake so he got up and made a cup of tea and we both then went
straight back to sleep. However this
morning Richard couldn’t wake up and I have a headache – mind you that could be
because of the alcohol consumed last night!
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| Our view this morning up to Woodham Bottom Lock |
It was a beautiful morning and we sat and waited for the lock keeper to
come. There was one other boat to go so
they went first. We were amazed by the
amount of duck weed on the canal – Richard was worried that Muffin might think
it was grass and try to walk on it!
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| A green canal |
We went up through four locks with no problem at all but at the fifth
lock, as Ewn Ha Cul was entering it, she hit something and her engine cut
out. Richard inched into the lock wary
of what had happened but all was OK – UNTIL we started to fill the lock and the
same things happened to Mary H. Gordon
and Richard went down their weed hatches and Gordon could see that his prop was
pretty mangled. Dot called out River and
Canal Rescue for both boats and after a lot of phone calls two guys from 4 All
Marine came out. One of them discovered
that our prop was well and truly jammed with something large and after a lot of
banging and thumping the “large thing” was freed and up popped a rather large
log. Next it was Ewn Ha Cul’s turn and
this time her prop was freed a bit quicker – but we never did see what had been
causing the problem. At least we now
both had engines and could move. Dot and
Gordon needed to turn round and head back to the River Wey where their prop can
be replaced. So they needed to go
through the sixth lock and then turn round.
Richard and I made the sad decision to turn round too – we had made
arrangements to see people while we were on the canal but our prop really needs
looking at too. So it was back down the
locks and we moored up where we started from this morning.
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| The engineer down at the weed hatch |
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| You can see where the log was split |
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| If you look carefully you can see a horizontal cut where our prop was wedged into it |
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| However it was quite an attractive canal if you take away the weed |
I wondered that maybe Gordon had hit the log first, splitting it, with
a piece of it embedding itself on their propellor. Richard then managed to hit
the remaining bigger section which firmly attached itself to our propellor.
Thus one piece of wood managed to cause mayhem to two boats! (Thanks Dot for
writing this first!)
Dot christened the piece of wood the Log Ness Monster!!!
2.94 miles
12 locks
Several of our greyhounds have mistaken duckweed for grass and had an unanticipated swim!
ReplyDeleteSue, nb Indigo Dream