To Walton on Thames

Monday 13th April 2009

It has been a beautiful day, with blue skies and lots of sunshine. Once again there have been large numbers of female rowers – sometimes with little understanding of narrowboats, and how they don’t actually have any brakes and how difficult it is to see a single rower nipping across in front of the bows from the back.





In our first lock today one of the big plastic boats got hung up on the bottom lockgates. There was a lot of shouting and waving of arms, but the lock keeper took it all in his stride, he was used to it. He said that he had one boat get hung up twice in a row.

There have been a lot more boats about today, with some considerable queuing for locks, although the lock keepers have worked hard to pack as many in as possible. Locks on the Thames arrive at about half hour intervals on average, so there is often not time to do very much between locks. Then two people are needed to hold the ropes front and back and pay them out as the lock empties.

Alan was doing this, and had become distracted by something else, he spotted just in time that his rope had got beneath one of the boat’s back doors, and had lifted it off its hinges. The door was completely free of the hinges and was leaning against the lock side, just on the point of falling into the lock. That would have been interesting, trying to recover that.

Passing Windsor












We passed Windsor Castle, but the Queen was not in residence.


We rang Thames Lock about booking a passage through Brentford out of hours so that we could leave Teddington on the high tide tomorrow evening, and gain access to the Grand Union. We had a somewhat strange conversation, where the charming man on the phone tried to persuade me that we wanted to go through early tomorrow morning. We looked at the situation again, and calculated the distances, and came to the conclusion that we just couldn’t do it. Then when the man phoned back he said to Alan that there would be no problem with passing through at 19:30 tomorrow, which is what we have booked. In fact, progress through locks has been so slow today that had we decided to try for a passage through tomorrow morning it is extremely unlikely that we could have managed it.

I was grateful to find a Waitrose not far from the river in Staines as our supplies had become very depleted over the Easter Weekend.

We found ourselves breasted up against the same Sea Otter narrowboat in several of the locks, and I got chatting to the female half of the couple. Our extended stay in Oxford came up, and I found myself trying to briefly explain what had happened. I was describing ‘our friend who took me to the hospital’ and the woman exclaimed “Bones! You must mean Bones – everybody knows Bones and Maffi!”

We are currently moored up in Walton on Thames. Having had kites circling overhead further up the Thames, squadrons of geese using the river as a landing strip yesterday, we now have flocks of bright green parrots squawking in the trees giving Walton an exotic aura.



Miles: 23.2 ; Locks: 11 Total Distance: 200.7; Total Locks: 115