Tuesday 27th September; Curdworth, one end to the other
Dave went out after breakfast to finish fitting the throttle cable in gloomy and overcast weather. I cleared and relaid the fire, then spent some time re-organising our fuel stores. We don’t have enough space to store a full bag of coal conveniently, so I moved our spare ropes out of one of the bow lockers to make room for a carrier bag of coal and another of wood, with room to lay mooring stakes, chain, hammer and piling hook on top. The ropes went into one of the dinette lockers inside. The rest of the coal went under the well deck on the starboard side, where we need an extra bit of ballast anyway. Then Meg and I went for a walk, finding a footpath on the other side of the canal running back down to the top lock.
Meanwhile Dave was having trouble getting the correct revs and had also discovered a broken clip at the Morse control end of the throttle cable. He got it working well enough to enable us to get through the tunnel to the village moorings, from where we called RCR. I made a quick visit to the shop, noticing a most unusual oak tree at the bridge. Its trunk is the thin brown upright just right of centre. I have never seen topiary done on an oak before.
RCR arrived very quickly, and managed to fashion a new clip from materials they had in the van. They sorted out the revs and Dave gleaned a lot of extra info at the same time. If it was up to me I am afraid I would have called them out yesterday, but Dave always wants to have a go at these things otherwise you never learn stuff and improve your skills do you? He’s right, of course. Besides which he enjoys these fiddly jobs.
Meg and I left the three of them to it and went to investigate mooring spots further along. We didn’t have enough time to get to a decent spot past the built-up bits of the canal before nightfall, but we needed to run the engine for the battery and hot water and it would have been a bit antisocial with a boat close behind us. We went just a few hundred yards further on, out into an open spot which was in full sun when it finally came out properly a bit later in the afternoon.
We got on with some jobs for the rest of the afternoon. Dave painted the stove with some extremely smelly paint, so bad he had to use a face mask.
But the weather is now so mild that we could have all the doors and windows open and the pong soon dissipated. He also washed and waxed the port side of the boat. I failed to clean the fly screens under the mushrooms as we haven’t got the right size screwdriver on the boat.
We have noticed a lot of large chunks of floating vegetation today, and wondered if they had been dislodged by the boats visiting the festival at Pelsall Common, and been brought down by the flow there seems to be on this canal.
We walked back to the village for a meal in the White Horse. OK, nothing special, but good beer.
It was a beautiful evening. There were no nasty niffs from the enormous sewage works which isn’t far away – but we are prepared for an early start tomorrow just in case!
Just half a mile today.
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