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Tuesday 12 April 2011

Strange goings on in the night

Sometime last night I woke up, it was dark and I have no idea of the time, I heard voices and thought, that's a couple of the long term moorers off to work, why are they just standing outside our boat talking. I listened a bit longer, it sounds like they are listening to the radio. A this point I decided to get up and investigate, I went through into the lounge to find our radio had switched its self on, how it did it I don't have a clue, its a car radio and its never done it before. I stepped over the dog and switched it off and headed back to bed.

We woke this morning to bright sunshine and set off at 10 am right behind "Sunset", but we only went as far as The Wharf where we stopped to fill with water. This is quite a good tap with decent presser so it didn't take long to fill up. The second tap was also in use and when they moved off a third boat pulled in, just as we were finishing a forth turned up for water and waited until we moved off.
The weather was pleasant as we made our way through Fenny tunnel but the breeze was quite cool in the more exposed parts. We arrived at the top of the Claydon flight to find two boats waiting to go down and one just coming out of the lock. The lock cottage had a table by the top gates where they were selling home made cup cakes at £2 for 4, we found them very tasty. There was a steady flow of boats coming up the flight but they were mostly slow and a bit wide spaced so we ended up waiting for the oncoming boat above every lock. One of them must hold the record for the slowest entry into a lock.

We saw several hand written notices pined to posts and boards saying that the Country Life museum has now closed but no official notice. Once clear of the flight we were also clear of the queues, but all the locks were against us.  The surprising thing was that we met 3 boats between Bourton Lock and the motorway but the next lock was still against us. There does not seem to have been any progress at Bourton Lock cottage.
Coming into Banbury we passed Sunset moored at Spiceball Park visitor moorings, we stopped at Sovereign to take on a 100 lts of diesel at 87 p lt, I stopped to have a quick word with Timothy West and thank him for introducing me to the canals many years ago with his program about the opening of the K&A
We were lucky enough to find a mooring between the foot bridge and the car park access bridge in Banbury at 5 pm. Since we have been here several boats have both left and arrived. Tomorrow we plan to drop through the lock and wind before retracing our steps to Napton.

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