A very short cruise

Trip 22:  Springwood Haven marina to the woods

We have been champing at the bit, impatient to get back to the boat, but appointments and other things have held us at home.  Our original idea was to turn left and do the Leicester Ring, ending at Calcutt marina rather than coming all the way back to Springwood Haven.  But we won’t have enough time to dawdle and enjoy it now, and what’s more we don’t want to risk getting stranded.  The Atherstone, Foxton and Watford flights have been on reduced opening hours for some time because of low water levels, and with all sorts of alarming messages about lack of water elsewhere on the system we don’t want to risk getting stuck somewhere we would rather not be!

We arrived back at the boat at about 2.30.  After the air-con in the car, the boat was like an oven, and even with everything open and some windows removed while we unpacked it was still uncomfortably hot as the boat had been quietly baking and storing heat for weeks.  So for health reasons we had to have an ice-cream from the office before we left.  We didn’t go far - probably less than half a mile before we found some decent shade and gratefully pulled in.  We stayed outside till the evening.

We won’t be cruising tomorrow – I need to catch a train from Nuneaton to Cambridge to attend a family funeral.  It’s only a mile and a half to the station from our mooring.  But at least the boat should be in shade for all but a few hours when the solar should get well and truly boosted.

You may have seen the short CRT video about the repairs to Tardebigge top lock already.  As the Tardebigge flight is on our ‘patch’ at Droitwich Spa marina, we have more of an interest than boaters elsewhere.  The marina Facebook group had a link to this post; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvmT9h-mzFw, which goes into more depth about the failure, how the lock was constructed, which bricks are being used/reclaimed for use and how they are cleaned, and how the reconstruction will be done – a very interesting watch if you have a spare 20 minutes.  Unfortunately it has a lot of adverts.