Tuesday 31st August

We decided to set off early this morning only to find that we couldn’t! The water level in the pound below us had dropped dramatically and as you can see from the photo one boat was hanging on a thread with no one on board! A tow path conference then took place amongst our fellow boaters and it was decided that, as we have the shallowest draft, we would go. We needed to get water into the lower pound to try and right the boat. We went down through the lock but it didn’t make any difference – the boat still hung there. Richard took Mary H along the pound as I didn’t really want to be the one who went aground but he made it to the next lock with no problem. There was another boat waiting to go through the lock so we went through together. The other boat, Unity, had been moored up just below the hanging boat and they had spent the night adjusting their mooring lines and listening to things crashing around in the other boat. There are a lot of locks between Crofton and Hungerford so we did them with Darryl and Lyn on Unity until we got to Lock 70 where we came across another boat waiting and discovered that one of the lock paddles was stuck and they were waiting for BW to come and sort out the problem. Two hours later and the lock was serviceable again. We sat on the balance beam and watch as the two BW men fished in the lock with an extendable rake like tool until they found a great lump of debris – dead reeds I guess. There was quite a queue waiting on both sides of the lock and we managed to get through on the second opening but this time we were with another boat. At the next lock we lost that boat and finished the day doing the locks on our own. We got into Hungerford at 7pm tired and hungry and of course no food on board! We went into the town and found a lovely Italian restaurant called Casanovas – the food was wonderful and the service excellent, if you are ever in Hungerford it is well worth a visit. I’ve put two photos on today which were taken about half an hour apart – it just shows you how the scenery differs on this canal.