Slapton (and a schoolboy error)

In case you have stanking plank picture withdrawal symptoms, here’s a pile at Horton wharf

We awoke at 6.00 on Thursday morning to a badly listing boat so I staggered outside to loosen the lines and try to push the boat off the bottom.  I managed to loosen the lines, but the boat was stuck solid.  It wasn’t as if we were in a short pound where we could let water through the next lock up, so there was nothing else to do but watch the water level and wait for it to rise again.  To make it worse, the next lock up had a short pound above it with a line of residential boats so they wouldn’t have taken too kindly to be losing their water if we had let it through the lock.

I rang CRT to let them know that the water was low in the pound and, by coincidence, it was the first pound that would be checked by the local water state check team that morning.  After watching the level (we both, independently, take marks on the side) for a while we agreed the water wasn’t dropping any further.

We were going to walk back to Marsworth and move the car up towards Leighton Buzzard, but decided it would be best to hang around and move the boat somewhere safer first.  After breakfast we noticed the level was rising slightly and realised a boat was probably coming down the lock and its water had reached us.  We rushed outside and, as the boat came past, managed to push ours free as his wake lifted us slightly.

The obvious thing to have done would have been to set off and go down the next few locks with him until we found a better place to moor; unfortunately, he was a 1 ½ beam so we wouldn’t both fit in the locks.  Instead we left the lines really long and poled the boat further out into the cut.  Luckily, we had moored in a wide stretch even though it was really shallow.  That’s the schoolboy error: if you have to moor in a shallow bit then at least have loose lines so you have a chance of drifting away from the side if the pound starts dropping overnight.

We finished breakfast and set off before the forecast rain started.

No sun on our cruise today

Our first lock of the day, Ivinghoe lock 33, soon came into sight and then it started raining.  This lock happened to be our 2,500^th lock since we moved permanently on board on 4^th November 2014, just over four years ago.  In that time, we have covered 2,822 miles so that’s an average of just under two miles and two locks a day.

A happy Karen, despite the rain, at lock 2,500

The CRT local water state check team arrived at the lock as we were going through and, after a quick chat with us and a bit of moaning about why the level had dropped, one of them disappeared into a little building.  He went in to switch on a pump that brings water up into the pound that had dropped.

At Horton lock we found our first stanking plank store for what seems like months.  Even the children, and Chris Hutchins, had pointed out there had been no mention of them in the blog for ages.  It wasn’t really a store, just a mess, but they were still functional stanking planks.

Stanking planks at Horton wharf

Even though we had topped up with water on Monday we filled up again at Slapton – the rain had stopped so we weren’t in a hurry to moor up for the day.

Black clouds rolling away after leaving the water point at Slapton

Karen bringing the boat into the last lock of the day – Slapton lock

We carried on for about ½ mile after leaving Slapton lock and moored in the middle of nowhere.  With the rain returning and looking to continue for some time, we stayed in for the rest of the day. 

When I took Buddy out for his last walk at 4.30, he turned around after a couple of hundred yards and ran back to the boat.  He had clearly decided it was too wet, that he had walked enough in the morning and that it was time for his tea anyway.

Our mooring for Thursday night - Buddy's spotted something

We cruised two miles down four locks on Thursday.