This morning, whilst we were still in bed, there was a terrific thunderstorm – really loud, and heavy rain. It eventually passed and we got up and had to make a desicion about staying put or moving. A guy on the boat moored next to us said that he had heard a weather forecast predicting a warm and sunny afternoon. We had some work to do on the outside of the boat so decided to move down to Kinver where, hopefully, we could do the jobs in the sunshine.

A fairly uneventful, though cold, journey until we got just short of Hyde lock. As we approached the site of the old wooden boat (now sunk) we could see a collection of four narrowboats at various angles across the cut. There were two moored up and, almost level with them, a hire boat diagonally across the cut and a sailaway in grey primer stuck on the mud on the inside of the bend. Neither the skipper of the hire boat nor of the sailaway seemed to know how to get themselves out of the predicament! A guy from one of the moored boats took charge (someone had to!) and first tried to get a rope from the sailaway to the bank, but the sailaway crew’s rope throwing skills were limited to say the least. The guy in charge then asked if we could approach the sailway, get a rope onboard and then try to tow them off backwards, which we did, but they were stuck firm. During all this the hire boat had managed to manouvre to create a gap wide enough for us to slip through. So we passed the sailaway, reversed back and got a line aboard their bow and eventually pulled them off of the mud.

We then left and went down onto the visitor mooring below Kinver lock. The sailaway moored just ahead of us a little while later and we had a chat with them. They had only bought the boat a few days earlier and were moving it from Blisworth to Stourport. Their only previous boating experience was a few years ago.

The sun did come out as predicted and we spent an hour or so cleaning and polishing.