Nice to start off with a Shakespearean quote for the heading as we went last night to see a live broadcast of Othello at the cinema. These live theatre broadcasts are good and we can recommend them. Anyway, back to the plot.
Sod’s Law strikes again. And again. Yes a double whammy this week. First our over winter mooring plans. Just like two years ago we are leaving Crick* at the end of September to migrate south for the winter along with the Icelandic redwings, although to be fair I don’t suppose a lot of the redwings will be heading for Slough. The idea was to take up a mooring at High Line Yachting on the Slough Arm for the winter, from where we will make sorties into Paddington for our winter breaks. Having fixed all that up, we now learn that from early January until mid March, our sorties will not be possible because the canal at Hayes will be closed while they do brickwork repairs on an aqueduct I never even knew was there. Doh!
There is a glimmer of hope however, because High Line also have a base at Northolt on the Paddington Arm so we have asked if it might be possible to transfer there.
Speaking of the dear old Slough Arm brings us to whammy number two. The end of next week is the Slough Canal Festival. A jolly affair to which we have been two or three times. A couple of weeks ago the folks at CRT contacted me to see if I was available to move their widebeam Jena from Adelaide dock to Slough for the festival (on the assumption that the refurb of Jena is completed by then. Aah, I hear you say, Jena won’t be ready. Well don’t jump to conclusions ‘cos that’s not the problem. To see the real problem follow this link to Nb Freespirit’s blog and scroll down to Irene’s twelfth photo on her Wednesday’s post. Yes, the dreaded pennywort has gone berserk down the arm. Getting a widebeamer down there is quite bad enough without having to plough through that lot. I have alerted CRT and hope they can send someone down there to clear the weed or I fear attendance at the festival will suffer.
* Not only are we leaving Crick for the winter, we won’t be returning next spring, opting instead to transfer to Cropredy marina for a year. Much as we love Crick, and we do, we fancy a break from endless trips through Braunston et al. Being based at Cropredy, we can perhaps get in a few trips on the Thames, and enjoy short outings to Banbury/ Aynho /Thrupp etc. and we’ll be no further from the likes of Wigram’s turn for other routes. Cropredy marina is of course run by the same folks as Crick, so arranging to transfer is simple. That’s the theory at any rate, but as we can see from the above, the best laid plans . . .