Returned from the Big River : )

Yay!  We made it.

After a long and gently winding route through bits of Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire, other shires and London, we, along with two other narrow boats, were eased gently out of Limehouse Lock into the hurtling tides of the Thames.  (A champagne cork rather than a melon seed style of exit).

(Look look!  There’s us in Limehouse Lock!!)

We hurtled.  Also we went up and down a lot.  Famous sights and fabulous views (and, yes, one, or should I say two, of those was/were indeed the lovely ILTV and her very nattily dressed Teen*)

rushed past in all directions and so did enormous vessels and little vessels and lots and  lots of water.  Bridges loomed and overwhelmed and vanished astern.  The other two boats looked like matchbox toys bobbing up and down far ahead of us.  (So I imagine we also looked like matchbox toys.  Certainly we felt like one.)

We all wore enormous orange lifejackets  (even the dog who made the trip lying on the stern deck looking interestedly round him in a vague and puzzled way) which made individual manouvering extremely difficult and at the back of the boat, the VHF radio, dangling from a hook, told us a wealth of fascinating information about vessel movements up and down the river.  We saw the lights above the bridge arches to tell us which arch to go through and the marker  buoys alongside the Houses of Parliament warning us not to go too close or we’d be torpedoed

and ooh, lots and lots of stuff.  We thought, possibly, we were doing about eight miles an hour – I know it should have been knots but no one knew precisely how to calculate those and on the canals you don’t travel at knots but miles.  And speaking of ups and downs, when those of us at the front of the boat looked at them on the back, it was quite alarming how much they seemed to be going up and down.  Apparently, from the back, the steerers couldn’t tell how far down the front was going (It’s a sixty-nine foot boat) and for a while they were quite anxious about whether the HUGE wakes we were bouncing over might swallow up the front before they could see it happening).  There were HUGE wakes : )  And big splashes along our little blunt bows.

Sadly we didn’t see any of the giant refuse barges or any giant container boats.  Nor were we boarded by the river police.  We passed an awful lot of picture postcard views and, well, it was all quite enormously exciting : )  And we didn’t get to use the anchor (though there was a hat overboard but it sank too quickly to be saved).

I won’t tell you now, about the flood, the fire or the dog overboard.  Got to keep some of the excitement for another time.  Also, I now have to download about 5 or 6 thousand photos and see if I can find any that will be interesting!

Keeping an Eye on the Aquarium

And I should probably mention that I missed you all LOTS and LOTS!!  And it’s so nice to be back even though it was really fun.

xxx

More tomorrow – ‘Night

*Not that we could exactly see from the far side of the river but as you will have notice from the photo, they were extremely smart, small, blurry, distant blobs – What do you mean you can’t see them?)