Wed 26 Jan 2011 Napton

Last night as planned we slipped across the cut and moored outside the door of The Boathouse, but even that close I was unable to pick up their WiFi in the boat. We went in for a meal and a drink and were quite impressed, still two main courses for the price of one, waitress service taking our order at or table and bringing our drinks over, the food was tasty and everyone very friendly. I think the other pubs in the area need to watch out.
I took a quick walk round to Midland Chandlers before pushing off at twenty to ten. The large building between MC and The Boathouse is now vacant with workman hard at it inside and on the canal side they were busy cutting back some of the trees.

Peter Boyce looks as if he is starting a collection of working and ex working boats, he now has one moored outside his yard completely wrapped in plastic, both hull and top sides, so I assume it must leak a bit. At Braunston Junction we turned left under the bridge towards Wigrams Turn. We only met a couple of boats and the weather was quite chilly with rain showers.

At Shugbrough bridge a boater has found he needed to moor with his bows almost in the bridge hole forcing boats to take a trip into the bushes to avoid him, there are miles of empty towing path on the other side of the bridge, its not exactly wall to wall boats this time of the year.

Over the past couple of weeks we have seen less than half a dozen hire boats about and lots of vacant visitor moorings, however the hire boat we saw this morning still found it necessary to to moor across the winding hole by The Bridge pub even though there was only one other boat moored there.
All the Napton Flight were with us which eased our journey and unlike when we went out there were quite a few boats moored by The Folly, I think there was only one here when we came down last week. We moored almost opposite our home mooring at just after 1 pm.