22nd August '15

We had a bit of an 'incident' at Alrewas. We were woken at 12.15 with a series of bangs on the boat. I put the lights on and John went out at the back but whoever it was had disappeared. In the morning it appeared that we'd had apples thrown at us, as they were along the mooring next to the boat. Morons. We've moored all over the place, often where others have told us not to but we've never had anything thrown at us before.

We left after breakfast and had good luck with all the locks but it still seems such a long stretch back to the marina. We came up behind a day boat meandering slowly along, enjoying their day out. We got up fairly close and I went up to the bow, the chap on the boat asked if we'd like to go past, I said that we wouldn't normally overtake, but we'd been out for 11 weeks and were only an hour from home. They happily waved us past and we headed off. Then just as we were coming into Willington, there was a hire boat across the canal with no one aboard. I got up to the bow of ours again and managed to climb aboard the boat, only to find that the middle rope plus the stern rope were both in the water with mooring spikes attached. I got them free but the boat was so badly tied up that I couldn't get to land, so John had to nudge it a bit with ours so that it went towards the shore. That meant that I was able to jump off and pull it in. Without anything to moor it to, I just tied the stern rope to the boat behind it and got back on ours, they could sort it out when they got back.
Getting back onto the marina was lovely, but I'm not so sure about our new mooring, we are no longer next to Keith and Karen and I'm missing them!

We spent Tuesday cleaning the boat, Wednesday John took the motor home to get it's MOT and I cleaned the boat. Thursday we went shopping and Friday the car had it's MOT and I cleaned the boat. We've paid our mooring fees and taxed both vehicles, just the insurance to go. Expensive time.
We're off to London on Monday to celebrate our wedding anniversary, so when we get back I'll hopefully have some pictures and I'll try hard to keep the blog going, but now I'm busy with the book, I want to get on with some patchwork and I've got some dressmaking to catch up with.