Saturday, 19 November 2016

Warwick (Breaking and entering)



I got on with some odd jobs on Friday morning whilst Karen caught up with some work.  When the boat was built it had a Yale lock at the front but no external lock at the back.  To leave the boat secure we would lock the back doors from the inside and leave by the front door.  This was an oversight as it meant traipsing through the bedroom every time we came home – particularly problematic as we had opted for a wider than normal bed so had very little corridor space.  This would mean a muddy Buddy walking against the bedclothes would not be popular!

The way the back doors had been constructed meant retrofitting a Yale lock wasn’t possible so we opted for an external padlock.  We don’t like the idea of these as it makes it obvious when we are out.  I suppose if we were leaving the boat for a period then we would lock it from the inside and go out through the front.

Anyway, the point of this long old story is that one of my Friday morning jobs was to fix a much bigger and stronger padlock, which I duly did.

After lunch we all went for a walk and it wasn’t until I snapped the new padlock shut that I realised I had the wrong keys with me.  This was the first time we had been locked out of the boat.  To be honest we used to keep a key hidden on the last boat, but not this one.  We have a few neighbours where we are moored but none had a bolt cutter I could borrow.

I rang the local boatyard and they said we could borrow theirs – in fact they suggested we brought the boat down and they would cut the lock for us.  A bit of an odd suggestion as if I had the keys for the boat then I would have the keys for the lock.  So, the first part of our walk was taken up with going to the boatyard to pick up the bolt cutters, coming back to break open the lock and then taking the cutters back.



We had a good walk and popped into the café at the top of the Hatton flight for cream teas.  All of us were very muddy and it wasn’t until Buddy was lying down asleep that we realised that we hadn’t cleaned him very well!




We will probably stay put for the weekend as we are near Warwick town centre and have quite few errands to run.  One of the main things is to find a post office as we need to send Karen’s phone off for repair.


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