Hail to the Hive!

We had a lot of locks between us and hometown but luckily we had a helping hand from an old friend, Elliot. Elliot came and met us at bridge 77 and we had 19 more locks and about 13 miles of canal to chug along.

Yravelingo by canal is slow. The boats are slow, it’s just how it is and it’s what we love about it. The locks we must negotiate make it even more time consuming yet in some weird way we love them. I knew having dine this stretch a few times before that it can take some time but it’s also fun so I asked my mate Elliot if he fancied giving us a helping hand. He jumped at the chance.

We met Elliot and set off and as luck would have it a boat chugged up behind us as we were getting ready to enter the first lock of the day.

Now with the locks on this stretch of canal being wide enough to take two boats at a time this was no problem and also meant that we had even more sets of hands to do all the chores of cranking the locks and opening and closing the gates. Things were looking up. Suddenly the workload was soooooo much less.

The couple in the other boat were great company and we quickly settled into a groove going through 5he locks and Elliot, Hive account@millycf1976 and myself felt completely at ease with the rhythm we had fallen into. It was easy, efficient, chilled out and much quicker.

Sharing the experience with a friend was fun as well as more efficient and with this stretch of canal being very familiar to us it was nice to point out some of the cool stuff we’d seen before like the big wide beam TONKA. We laughed saying how you could fit 4 badger the Narrowboats into Tonka easily.

The weather was a azing and with all the extra help we found ourselves skipping through the locks with ease and were soon knocking on the city’s door.