6th May '13

Another beautiful day. As we were preparing to take Paddy for a quick walk into Hungerford, who should come past but Drental (means meandering in South African). They were pulling in for some supplies so we have our cruising partners back again! Hooray!

Hungerford was much larger than we'd expected - very long wide street, full of antique shops and estate agents it appeared. For a bank holiday it was remarkably quiet.

While we were getting ready we had the hatch open and John spotted a new family of moorhens - we threw out some bread and they came over and mum was catching the bits and feeding them to her babies - very sweet I thought.

This is the fattest of the three - I wonder why - long after the others had left he was there taking the bread from her mouth!

Then out of nowhere came this flower - floating down the canal on it's own. I snapped at it and am really pleased with the effect - one of my better photos I fancy.

This was the first of the locks (of the 10 we've done today - only about 5 miles which shows how many locks there are!) and there was a swing bridge right in the middle of it! Apparently there is an ancient right of way across here and a normal bridge that you find across the bottom of the lock was obviously not sufficient. It means that going up you can get in the lock but can't move until the bridge is open. Who thought this up?

Along this stretch of the canal you have to empty the locks after use and we discovered that someone had forgotten to shut the top paddles. This means that water was simply flowing from the higher pound straight into the lower one - something that shouldn't happen unless a lockkeeper needs to moderate water in a pound. This meant that there was an increasing shortage of water in the pounds as we were travelling up - here you can see the grass and the height where the water would normally have been, the edges were really bad and rocks were showing along a lot of it.

Here you can see the dangers of mooring too tight when the water level goes down. It is going to have trouble getting off as the rudder is fixed firmly in the mud. Oops.

We are now moored at Great Bedwyn, and having to use the gangplank again. The very few moorings with pilings that there are all full so we are stuck here for the night - at a slight angle but nothing like as bad as the boat above! We've had a walk around the village and it's very pretty - 2 pubs that are both shut on bank holiday afternoon so not the liveliest of places, so hopefully a peaceful night. We have planned to get up early tomorrow so that we can continue with Roy and Daphne as we have slipped into an easy rhythm. The only problem is that they usually leave about 2 hours before us, so we are compromising tomorrow!

We are both catching the sun nicely but apparently the weather is due to change on Wednesday. Lets hope they're wrong.