There has been quite a lot of activity here in the marina since our departure on June 30th.
We have a new brood of cygnets, at least three new batches of ducklings (10, 5 and 4) and the little darlings we left behind aren’t quite so little any more.
One of the Egyptian ducks/geese has returned, although looking closely, it could be that this is an elusive female and the resident guys haven’t caught up with her yet.
Hubby went marching off after a heron the other evening as he thought it had a duckling in its beak. It was an eel, so he let him off, otherwise we may have had heron steaks for supper.
Laughing Duck is back but we have seen no sign of our cleaning crew, although we’ve heard some other hammerheads at work. There are plenty of new drakes on patrol though, just beginning to sport their green feathers, and I’ve also seen a couple of adult moorhens. The one sitting on eggs is still sitting, but the babies should hatch in the next week or so.
There are also a couple of new boats in the marina, and I watched today with interest a couple wiping, drying and polishing the plastic ‘windows’ in the covers on their large cruiser only for the rain to start just as they settled down on the back deck with a glass of wine.
It has been raining on and off all day, but we’ve managed to walk the dog twice (OK, got a little soggy) and cleaned the roof and windows on the boat as the swallows must have been making up for lost time with their target runs.
Their latest perch is the new boat next door (I took these through our kitchen window).
We also did some maintenance inside today, which was a bit of a game as space was limited and true to form we put something down and either couldn’t find it, or had to move it to make room for something else!
As always, the manual made it look so easy, just “unscrew bolt, slide off the pipe, and the unit will become free to remove from its mounting”.
Yeah, right.
Bolts were awkward to get at, pipes leaked and the unit had been welded to its counterpart. I took one look at the thing we were going to replace and thought ‘It’s never going to fit in that!!’
Not to worry, it was fascinating to see Hubby work round the problems, and I actually gave him a solution for putting the damn thing back together insomuch as the order in which to replace the bolts!
Market Day tomorrow, and we both need socks, so we shall bite the bullet and hopefully get the type we used to find in Boston. Sadly the price is twice what we paid there, but the other alternatives are rubbish, and paying £5 for 3 pairs instead of getting 6 is still cheaper than driving all that way only to find the price has either gone up or they don’t sell them anymore!
It’s good to be home though, but we are already thinking of our next trip upriver, maybe just for one night away. There are plenty of free overnight moorings available, so we shall just have to see. We had an email from one of our boating friends (old hands who do something like 500 miles a year on the rivers and canals) who said we’d done very well to cram so many locks into so short a time, especially as it was all new to us.
pensitivity101 