Simon (No. 1 son) joined us today for the short run through Braunston as we wanted to clear the area before next weeks Historic working boat rally.
We set off from Flecknoe following a Black Prince hireboat who had the misfortune of meeting all on-coming craft on bends or in bridgeholes. One of those was nb Shilling whose steerer announced that they were followers of our blog. Hello, nice to meet you briefly.
On we processed slowly towards Braunston building up quite a log-jam behind due to the amount of traffic going each way. I do hope they do not build any more marinas on this pound as it’s getting very busy at weekends now and being weekenders ourselves for most of the year we cannot avoid having to traverse it on a Saturday or Sunday.
We finally made it to Braunston where we passed Draco and Success, saying a brief hello to Krystina and then moved on towards Bottom Lock we met John (nb Black Pig) for a chat as well. A single boat, Larry, was just entering the lock as we approached and so we shared with him all the way to the top of the flight. Once through bottom lock we found ourselves 6th in the queue for No. 2 and only experienced one other ‘straight in’ lock entry during the rest of the flight and that was the top lock.
Our passage through Braunston tunnel was missing one important ingredient. No, not oncoming boats because we met several of those, on this occasion the tunnel roof was dry. It’s not often you experience that lack of annoying drippy bits. I suspect it was because I had made the effort to rig up Jannock’s mega-torch aimed at the tunnel roof to assist me in avoiding them. Sod’s Law that is!
When we had finally moored up, Simon wanted to find a tree to hang his para-gliding harness onto so that he could adjust the straps to get them comfortable. No suitable trees were to be found and so he installed the gang plank into ‘diving configuration’ (see 2003 GiG day 1) and hung his harness from that. Job done.
Graham
www.jannock.org.uk
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