Home Thursday 6 March 2014

Its a lovely quiet mooring here at Calcutt overlooking the Napton reservoir, I must say I cant ever remember seeing it so full.

I had a bit of work to do before we set off as I am relining the side hatches, we suffered with the rain blowing in during the gales this winter. Its something I should have attended to 12 years ago. Originally the doors were lined with 18mm ply. the doors are steel and constructed a bit like tin lids so the ply sat inside the steel door. This always suffered with the damp so I changed the wood to white UPVC, I have now added a second layer of 9mm thick that not only fits inside the door frame aperture but also forms a lap on where the doors meet.

It was almost 1030 before we left and didn’t meet any boats all the way home. We moored for a while by The Bridge Inn, Napton so that I could work on the two hatches on the other side of the boat, its much easier to be beside a good towpath.
There has defiantly been some activity at The Bridge Inn since we passed this way a fortnight ago, as there were lights on and furniture has been moved around, so maybe it will open again soon.

Our next stopping point was the moorings by the Folly where we stopped for lunch before heading up the flight, here at the back of the Towing Path is a DiS post which were installed on the approach to locks, in the case of this one, someone has dug it out and put it back the wrong way round. Just as we were casting off a boat came passed, this meant that the locks would definitely all be against us, but when we rounded the bend they were emptying their loos at the service point just below the bottom lock. We enquired if they were ready to set off which they weren’t  so we went ahead on a good road to the top, we did draw the bottom paddle on every lock when we left so that had a good run as well.
Needless to say as normal it started to rain as we made our way up the flight. There was a good flow on all the bywashes so we had a reasonable depth over the mud to get up the arm to our mooring.

The next rip will be down to Braunston for Blacking.