Sunday, May 06, 2012

New Royal Yacht previewed at Little Venice

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Yes, you saw it here first.  Of course there has been no official announcement that this is the replacement for R.Y. Brittannia, but what else could it be?  I think Her Maj will be delighted.

The flags were all out at Little Venice in celebration.

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O.K. it was the annual canal cavalcade. We popped down by train for the day to see the event and to catch up with Simon(Tortoise)  and Carrie (Blackbird) who as usual led us astray on the cider.  Lovely to see them though.  Once again Tortoise had grabbed the prime spot for watching the pageant.  You can just see her (the little red boat)under the trees in this picture.

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I don’t know how many boats made it through all the restrictions, but Brownings Pool was full up as you can see, and there were more bunting-ed boats up the arm towards Paddington basin.  Boaters are a hardy lot.

Speaking of which, hardy is what you need to be if you are on the Thames at the moment (or the Nene for that matter).  All the blog reports coming in look pretty scary.  I offered to help out Richard on Indigo Dream stuck in the swirling waters at Wallingford, as he ought to be getting the boat back for a Jubilee Pageant rehearsal in London at the weekend.  In the end it looks like discretion won out over valour and Richard decided it was too dangerous to move despite the temptation to cruise down half the Thames using only half a pint of diesel.  I’m sure I would have made the same decision, although I suppose narrow boating at 10 mph would have been fairly thrilling to put it mildly.

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