To summer mode ...

At about 9am on the Friday morning (24th May) the mooring warden come along taking a note of boat numbers, names and a photo of each moored boat.  The moorings here and on the Thames Court, and Desborough sites are now strictly 24 hour only with no return within 48 hours.  George got chatting to him and asked if we could stay until Monday and the warden agreed that this was ok ... thank goodness!  

Apart from being a Bank holiday weekend, the weather being good ensures that the river will be extra busy, we've got lots of jobs inside Still Rockin' that we want to get done once all the dust had settled after being in the dry dock for hull blacking.

George wanted to sweep the chimney flue and clean the fire and put away the log basket, fire tools, coal scuttle, chimney etc., for the summer.  I wanted to vacuum all through the boat, wash the floor and swap over the sofa covers from the red ones to the grey ones.  There was also bedding to be changed and washing to be done and dried.

We worked steadily through most of the tasks until about 4pm when we called it a day and had our evening meal.  Saturday we carried on where we left off with George helping me to move the furniture around whilst I vacuumed and mopped the floor an sorted the wash pile as I went; again we worked through until it was time to eat and relax.

9pm on Saturday night looked towards the sunset from our mooring   above Pharoe's Island.

Sunday passed in a similar fashion although I can't for the life of me remember what it was we were actually doing! We also realised that tomorrow was Monday when we'd promised the warden that we'd leave the mooring but that it was also Bank holiday Monday!  What should we do? ... go? ... or ... stay? and hope the warden doesn't notice?

Sunday's sunset view except it was raining!

Bank holiday Monday we decided we'd have to leave, the warden had been good enough to let us overstay but perhaps not to overstay our welcome for another time and it was about 10 o'clock when we pulled away.  

Our plan was to turn downstream and see if there was a space free outside the Thames Court above Shepperton Lock.  If there was, we'd stay for the 24 hours, have a meal at the pub and leave early on Tuesday morning to continue our journey upstream.  If there wasn't a space for us we would turn round again and join the busy river traffic going upstream back to their bases after the long weekend and hope that we'd get a decent mooring eventually ... our aim was for Runnymede. 

Turning Still Rockin' on the River Thames

Perhaps we can get in that space ... there's a notice (red) that says 'no mooring due to construction work' but the construction finished months ago but the landing there hadn't been put back to right afterwards yet.  It was also unlikely that they would be doing anything today on a bank holiday, so we decided to go for it.  We'd need to turn round to get in putting Still Rockin's rear end to the right of the tree because the huge Humber keel Day Break to the left has its mast sticking out (you may just be able to see it sticking out over its stern above the wooden fence with a red flag on the end in the left picture and how it looked once we were moored behind it (right).

Behind us was the hotel boat Tranquil Rose was moored

This will be ok for us ...

certainly so much better than joining the mayhem on the river today!

Needing some extra provisions we walked down the towpath to the lock and Nauticalia's ferry over the river to Weybridge.  

There has been a ferry in operation here for over 500 years.

Once the shopping was done and we returned to put it all away aboard Still Rockin' we went over to the pub for dinner.  The afternoon was spent kipping and writing up yesterday's blog post.