Braunston

It was quite a night, in the evening the temperature rose quite rapidly along with heavy rain and wind, the temperature must have dropped just as fast as there was still snow around this morning. We didn’t set off until 11 am. and that felt like a mistake with fine , cold rain hitting my face, however a couple of bends and it stopped. All the rain had brought the canal up a few inches with the towpath under water

in places, at bridge 103 I had to drop the exhaust to get under it and there was about 4” going over the spill weir. Mind you it blew/washed the mucky weather away, there is still a windmill at Napton.

We passed this pair of boats near the old Bridge Inn, the front one with the bike on is the butty and the

 

motor which has a hydraulic drive to a motor in the rudder pushes it. You can see the hoses running down to it.

Yesterday I mentioned the wide beam boat moored near Wigrams Turn, you can see in this photo the mooring lines tied loosely around the piling rail.

By now the weather had improved a lot and the sun actually popped through now and again.
CRT have done a couple of bits of piling, this one should be a nice mooring once the mud dries out,

the other length they have piled will be useless as they have attached reed growing coir sausages all along the front of it.
They were still cutting back the undergrowth on the offside of the puddle banks and with the rising water they were just over topping in one spot.

At Braunston junction we turned left onto the North Oxford canal and drew across to the offside to take on water, but the area was under a couple of inches of water so we abandoned that idea, reversed back round the junction and headed into Braunston to fill up, then on to the marina entrance to wind, it was then we spotted a mooring spot behind the Rothen work boats beside the marina so a short reverse into there for the night.

Today’s Journey

   7½ miles with no locks in 2½ hours