Marina unsealed!

 It's official! The stop planks sealing Cropredy marina from the canal are to be removed this week.  Don't get excited though because the canal itself outside the marina is only navigable between Cropredy lock and Broadmoor lock, a distance of about 800 metres, and even then there's nowhere to turn a boat round, so we won't be venturing out yet awhile.

However many boaters in ther marina will be glad because they will also remove the stop planks between the three basins, so those who have been sealed off from the service pontoon in the main basin will at last be able to visit the diesel pump and the toilet pump out machine. Deep joy I imagine.

The irony is that as far as I can tell, the stop planks haven't done any good anyway as very time I've looked at them the water has been at the same height on either side. In fairness to CRT though, it might have been a different story if the canal pound outside the marina had drained or dried out.

In about three weeks time CRT plans a temporaty reopening of the whole canal to let those poor folk stranded away from their base to get back to their home mooring. It will be only temporay though as the feeder reservoirs are still extremely low.  At least one of the reservoirs feeding our bit of canal is still so low that the water doesn't even reach the spillway into the canal.  What's more the recent rainy spell seems to have stopped now and we're not due any serious rasin in the next couple of weeks at least.

Nevertheless we do plan to go and stay on Herbie later this week to get a couple of jobs done, one of which is to measure up a template for the tonneau cover we intend to make.  I now have a cunning plan for the hoops we need to give the cover a rain shedding arched profile.  Some bendy wooden slats held in an arch like an archer's bow.  Instead of a bow string there will be nylon straps with a buckle in the middle.

This sort of thing:

Using these, we can adjust the length and tension and also release the strap to let the slats lie straight for storage.  That's the plan anyway. We'll do a trial run this week. Wish us luck.