Bathampton

10 miles, 1 lock The weather forecast was for the rain to start around noon and then continue for the rest of the day. So we decided to get up early and get to Bath before the worst of the rain. Unfortunately the rain decided to get up early too! By the time we got

Hilperton

We have been at the campsite with the Davies family for the past two days. They packed up the tent etc this morning and left about 11:00. We carried on towards Bradford on Avon, down the Seend flight. Here we encountered a Foxhangers hire boat crew who seemed to have received woefully inadequate training by

Foxhangers footbridge

1.5 miĺes 21locks We waited at the top until just after 9:00 for grandson Leo to walk up from the campsite. He crewed for us all the way down. Other members of the Davies family joined us at various times over the next two hours. We shared all but the first two locks with an

Devizes Wharf

11.5 miles and 0 locks. Just a very pleasant chug along the 15 mile ‘long pound’ towards Devizes today. We arrived here about 11:30, but didn’t go down the flight as our crew, in the shape of two of our grandsons, is arriving tomorrow evening. We’ll go down the flight on Friday. We encountered quite

Pewsey Wharf

10 locks 7 miles Another earlish start. Up through lock 60, then topped up with water. The water point here must be one of the worst positioned on the whole network! It’s immediately above the lock on the off side, but there is only about 40ft of actual mooring space. So the front of the

Crofton

6.5 Miles, 13 locks It rained most of the night, but had stopped by dawn. We breakfasted and then were away by 7:30. The locks on this stretch come fairly frequent, about one every half mile. We did them all on own own except for the last two. Many of the bottom gates were leaking

Hardly moved!

Only about 200yds and one lock today. This morning we moved to just above the lock. Below was a 24hr mooring and we wanted to stay another day. Also the mooring above the lock was more conveinent for the work we wanted to do touching up the paintwork on the side. The day was spent

Hungerford

Terrific thunderstorms during the night. It started about 4 o’clock, really hard rain, loud thunder and lightening. But by the morning it had stopped and the sky was mostly grey, but with some blue. 10 locks and 9.5 miles today. Yesterday we shared all the locks, today we shared none. In fact we saw very

Newbury

Hot, hot, hot today. It’s still 26 C at five o’clock! Shortly after setting off this morning we caught up with narrowboat ‘Amy’ at Woolhampton swing bridge. They let us through and we then spent the rest of the day with them sharing the next ten locks, and several swing bridges. We worked together well

Aldermaston

10.5 miles and 11 locks today. We set off at 7:05. It was warmish then, but has got much hotter, peaking at 27 °C at around 4:30. Last time we came this way we got exhausted on this stretch as we tried to do too much. Today we have taken it easier. The river through