Canal folk are a strange breed who seem to relish in stories of difficult tunnels or long flights of locks. Many boaters have been telling us for days that the delays caused by the Cain Hill pump failure will mean long queues and chaos when it reopened this weekend. So what happens? We arrived at the first lock to find it deserted, we actually had to hang around so another boat could join us, the locks are wide enough to take two normal narrow boats side by side and with two boats you have twice as many crew sharing the work of opening and closing gates and paddles and it saves water so worth doing. We had a few bottle necks when we met boats coming down but we managed to go through 23 locks in five and a half hours. There are another six to go but we are saving them for tomorrow.
Peter and Jane joined us so probably never want to see a canal lock again! The banner picture shows a widebeam boat at the top lock, we have gained 237 feet during the day.
Every time you go through a lock several thousand of gallons of water are lost down to the lock below (each lock has its own header pond) and eventually the water drops out of the bottom lock. The electric pump at the bottom pumps 32 million litres of water back to the top every day or a locks worth every 11 minutes (that is about a swimming pools volume). So when it was broken last week everything stopped. In Victorian times they had steam pumping engines to do the work, I have no idea if they were reliable.
One boat we saw had the name “Adventure before Dementia” we might adopt this as our motto (until of course we get dementia).
Tomorrow will be a rest day, we will do the last six locks in the morning, visit the canal museum followed by a late Sunday lunch in quite a smart looking restaurant in Devizes, a full report will appear tomorrow evening.