16th March (my birthday!)

We finally got underway today with a new gearbox! John wanted to explore up-stream so we headed up to Godmanchester, which has to be one of the prettiest places ever - lots of timbered buildings and some lovely water frontages - very Toad Hall!

Well we got to the first lock and luckily we had walked over to see it yesterday because it was a guillotine lock and we hadn't done one of them before - scary or what!

This is not a poor photo - it really was quite gloomy at that point! the usual lock gates are on the downstream bit that's in the foreground and the up and down bit is at the back. Luckily the gate is raised by electricity on these locks at least so that made it a bit easier for John to do the work.

here is Paddy being a proper boat dog! waiting at the lock for me to do the ropes and John to do the gates!

I have just steered the boat into the lock and the gate is now down - as I said this is the first lock of this type we have done and I wasn't prepared for the ferocity of the force of water as it comes in as the gate is raised - minutes after this was taken I was diagonally across the lock - terrified of damaging the paintwork - what I actually did was to mess up the bikes on the back of the boat even more than John had done with his mooring - not sure that we can ride them now! At least we now know why people don't have bikes on the back of boats very often!

This idyllic scene put an end to us going any further upstream - the water coming in the centre is what we had just had to come down, around bends that you wouldn't believe in a 62' boat - they are definitely designed for little plastic pigs and NOT for narrowboats! the water to the left of the picture is no entry as it leads to a weir (hate rivers) and the water on the righte blo is the entry to the lock, which is the direction the boat is facing. SO we have had to swing the boat around a right angle and then needed to swing out again and sharp right. To add to that, the lock gates did not have the usual size bit for the windlass to fit onto so John was having a horrible time trying to open the gates. We eventally decided that enough was enough so we put the lock back and it was and then spent the next 20 minutes or so trying to turn the boat to go back up the nasty narrow, bendy channel - bending the bikes again in the process!

Did I mention that the bow-thruster stopped working? Well it did! and that caused a lot of the problems.

Anyway we got back to Huntingdon and moored up at the hotel that John had booked for the evening and did some more sorting out on the boat. When we have finally got everything in place I will take some interior pictures and add them to the blog but there's still a few bits to do.

Although it sounds like one disaster after another we are still glad that we have done it and are looking forward to our calm stressfree life - I think it may not happen until we get off these wretched rivers and return to our beloved canals!