27th June '15

Today was the day of the stag parties! We had at least 5 boats go past us full of testosterone before we got away this morning, plus one hen party.
This meant of course that when we arrived in Bath shortly after, there was chaos at the lock.
As we arrived there appeared to be boats at every possible angle across the canal, so John dropped me off to see what was actually happening. Two stag parties ( the ones across the canal), were waiting to go down, one stag party was on the end of the lock bollards and said they were stuck, the hen party were distraught because they had come past the winding hole where they were supposed to turn and didn't know what to do!
We came up and held alongside the girls as the 2 boats eventually went down, and then got onto the lock  mooring. John got off to do his thing, and between us we persuaded the girls to ring their hirers and ask if they could go down the two locks with us where they could turn.
In the meantime the boat that was stuck, became unstuck but after seeing them manoeuvre I didn't want to go through with them, and luckily another hire boat had turned up (are you following this?) so we suggested that they went down together as they both wanted to turn.
The sun was beating down through all this, and John was still doing lock operations.
The girls then said they'd got the ok, but we still had to wait for the other boats to go down. Finally it was our turn and we went down quite easily with the girls, who were delightful, and they successfully turned their boat and we continued on our own. It all suddenly went very quiet! I quite missed the girls. One of my worst fears was doing the deep lock on my own, but I did and it was fine, another silly worry I didn't need to have had.
We got onto the Avon and are now moored in the place of the 'Rolex' incident of two years ago! Tomorrow we get down and moor outside the boatyard in preparation for Monday.
We've been to Sainsburys and stocked up again, so at least we won't starve!