The big black hole ..

… that is Bulbourne and a steel tube!

With the threat of more nights of well below freezing gone for the foreseeable future there was no excuse last Sunday (8th Feb) for us not to take our leave of our mooring below Cowroast Lock.  After taking advantage of the sanitary station services we were on the move again!  Yeah!!!

Jaq and Les on nb Valerie took the lead ...

 … and we encountered broken ice at bridge 136 which is what we expected

 … and were given a display by two model jet fighters high above the trees, this one a de Havilland Sea Vixen.  They were going far too fast for me to catch the other one too as we moved through the deep cutting.

Wonderful signs of spring as we cruised, catkins glowing in the sunshine and snowdrops covering the banks and edges of the canal.

Glad we met him on a wider stretch but there was plenty of room.  Not so a little further on where a wide beam was moored by the road bridge.  We could see a dinghy protruding from behind the moored boat and initially we thought that we could ‘nudge’ it in as we slowly passed, but it was not to be!  As we got closer we could see a narrowboat moored close behind it. I called to a lady on the towpath who seemed to belong to one boat or the other and asked if she could pull the dinghy in which she did but it was already too late for us as George had steered over to the offside and we were very firmly stuck on the silt!  It took us a good ten minutes to get unstuck using all the facilities Still Rockin’ has, forwards, backwards and sideways!

We soon arrived at our destination and are now moored below the water point and winding hole (turning point for boats).

Unfortunately the signals here are near to non-exsitant both mobile phone and internet.  The first four photo’s of this post took 8-hours to load!Today I decided that I’d either have to sit on the back deck with the dongle outside or sit inside with the back doors open if I wanted to get online again and as you can see it’s worked!  The dongle is outside but I’m sitting inside with the back door closed! Now why on earth didn’t I think of that last week I’ll never know!