Last night we did “wild” mooring, that is tied up in the middle of nowhere with metal poles hammered into the canal bank for the ropes. The picture opposite shows our mooring, with close examination you may notice that the boat is at a jaunty angle, that is because the water level dropped overnight and we were now stuck in the mud.
A few heave ho’s and we were released so we could then tackle 10 locks before lunch which was taken in a trendy pub at the local tourist spot at the bottom of of Foxton Locks, a flight of 11 very small locks. Hundreds of people had come out to see the them on this lovely sunny day only to find there were no boats, the canal is almost deserted at the moment (we only saw three other boats today).
We will attempt the locks either tomorrow afternoon when there will be hundreds of people watching or Sunday morning when it might be a bit quieter. Despite Gills excellent steering she is a little apprehensive of making a fool of herself (you can imagine the “woman driver” comments) so it might be Sunday when we go through.
We also passed though our first tunnel, this one was 880 yards long and in theory wide enough for two narrow boats to pass in the middle but I was very thankful we did not meet anyone coming the other way. As a large ship discovered in the Suez Canal a few weeks ago when you drive a boat close to a bank it steers into it, a tunnel has a bank very close by on both sides so you tend to oscillate from side to side all the way through.
Today we took a small 4 mile diversion to Market Harborough, a place I would have struggled to pinpoint on a map before today. It has a very nice canal basin with a pub / restaurant which was unfortunately full this evening but we are booked in tomorrow for lunch when we will be joined by our friends Ray and Gael. On the plus side because the restaurant was full we ate two very nice steaks from the local Co-op washed down with an excellent Malbec on the back of the boat right next to the diners who were probably paying four times the amount for the same food. The only difference being I had to do the washing up.