Boating after a world record Balloon attempt.

Yesterday, Brenda and I assisted the Ballonatic84 crew to enable them to enter the Cross Channel Ballooning Record attempt. They didn’t have any-one to drive their recovery vehicle across to France to fetch the balloon back so I volunteered at the 11th hour and took Brenda along for the day out. She was not impressed with the 01:15 start as I had said it would be early but hadn’t explained quite how early. There is an excellent video at https://youtu.be/j8xponXjVdw

Back to boating, another weekend and another celebration cake. Happy Birthdays to me, Alice and Matt. All we need now is to be able to celebrate a new Guinness World record attempt yesterday.

If we had seen it last weekend – we’d have thought “April Fool!” – a chap skiing down the towpath on wheeled skis. Looked damned hard work.

We shared all of today’s locks with a short (30’) narrowboat named Frog and at Ivinghoe Top Lock, where we caught up an equally short singleton, we managed three boats in one lock. The steerer on Frog was suffering from a broken toe but we soon set up a routine of using a single gate to exit that make progress good.

We moored for the night between Leighton Lock and the Globe, a nice quiet mooring if you stay near the Eastern end of the sewerage works on the opposite bank. It seems that the West End is the noisy end. Brenda had brought a container of “chicken casserole” out of our freezer at home for dinner tonight. When she opened it she found that it contained Apple, Rhubard and Plum. So, at last we got to try the Army rations we bought at Milton Keynes market several years ago. A chicken curry, a lamb curry and a vegetable biriani. All needed to be warmed in boiling water and then the pouches opened and poured onto the plates. They were really tasty and we washed down with a couple of beers – excellent!

Graham