Tower Hamlets Monday 22 August 2016

Last night we were late to bed, good job as at half past midnight this party boat came by, all the lights on and music blasting let alone the noise from the people parting onboard, I don’t know what time it was when it went back down as I had been asleep by then and it was to dark to see the clock. As you can see its not the best shape for cutting smoothly through the water, yes that is the bow. I hope they were all up in time for work today.

We passed a rather famous Narrowboat, “”I Frances that has actually crossed the Atlantic Ocean

A friend of mine Brian Goggin has written about her in a PDF HERE 

We stopped for water at the beginning of the Olympic developments, the area looks a bit run down already with several units closed up. we then started to pass other parts of the Olympic site.

The CRT weed cutters were hard at work at the bottom end of the Lee. One was running back and forth between Old Ford Lock and the junction with Ducketts Cut and cutting quite deeply, the other  was working near the locks skimming off the duckweed. They were both dumping it in a barge moored in the mouth of one of the locks.

Once through Old Ford locks there were loads of mooring spaces, obviously not a very popular area to moor. The buildings in this area were interesting in shape, the taller one staring slightly narrower than it is about a third of the way up and then narrowing again to the top. The other as you can see is very angular.

There is an awful lot of redevelopment ongoing with land being cleared, I guess this chimney must be listed as so far it has escaped the bulldozers.

We passed the entrance to the Bow Back River which is still closed and also  Bow Locks as we made our way to Limehouse Cut. looking up up we could see this Bicycle rickshaw parked up. There are several websites offering these in London. Almost into Limehouse Basin and we passed this Floating Cinema moored up, I have looked at their web site and don’t know where exactly they are when they are open, unless its where we saw it.

I think there are even more boats moored in Limehouse Basin than when we last came this way, the one that I will remember was this Thames Barge with no holes chopped in the hull for windows.

The rest of the basin was full of a very varied collection of vessels both sea going and inland, narrow and broad.

Leaving the basin we turned back onto the Regents canal via Commercial Road Lock which was set in our favour, unlike the next one. As the lock filled I spotted this window cleaner, cleaning which ever window he swung nearest to. He was doing both this one and the narrow one at the same time

We stopped for a bite of lunch on the 4 hr visitor mooring before pushing on. Just as we had the top gate open at Mile End Lock a chap came up at quite a speed, said he had a boat following us and he would close up so we could be on our way, the then fully drew the bottom paddle before I had even started out of the top gate, I had to go almost to full power to get out, he then just tipped the beam so the gate swung shut with quite a force. I had enquired about waiting at the next lock but he wouldn’t tell me how far back his boat was, I suspect several locks. we slowly made our way to Old Ford Lock where two volunteer lock keepers helped us up, still no sign of a following boat. We carried on still slowly as its all moored boats and moored on the outside of a single boat just at the north end of Victoria Park. Some time later a boat came by with the chap we had met at Mile End Lock and I was very disappointed to see that he was on a very well known old community run Narrowboat. They obviously don’t have much interest in the infrastructure of the canals they are using.

Today’s Journey  6½ Miles, 6 Locks, 3 waterways in 3½ hrs