23 Years? You Get Less For Murder!!

First thing today is to turn the boat round and head back downstream, this having been done I see our first parrots of the trip!! More parrots than kingfishers now. There are some menacing black clouds in the vicinity, but these soon morph to dark grey, light grey, white and then clear blue sky. It's quite windy making us crab along a bit from time to time, but quite manageable.

Soon enough we see Marsh Lock and the keeper taking off the self service board, perfect timing yet again!!
We cruise slowly through Henley and take careful note of the sign telling us to keep right and cruise along the regatta course, I was paying particular attention to this because when we came this way last year there was a bit of an altercation with a rowing crew, I wanted to avoid another one.

It was quite difficult as the wind was blowing across and I was trying to keep to one side to allow the two racing eights coming up behind as much room as possible.

A very posh day launch overtook us, in it was a picnic basket with the lid open, showing us the anchor butter and tesco packaged meat, didn't quite live up to the initial expectation. We caught it up again in Hambledon lock, a bit nervy jockeying 20 tons of steel in close proximity to a wooden day launch!!

Below the lock by the old Aston Ferry, (we used to launch our canoes here in days past) there was a cruiser looking for something, no idea as to what, it just kept running search patterns with boat hook on standby. We trundled on quite slowly to Hurley lock where we were signalled in to join a much larger cruiser, I didn't think there was room for the two of us, but there was, keeper always knows best!

Then the short run to Temple lock where old school acquaintance Dave Hemingway was on duty, then in no time at all we were weaving through all the rowing crews to try to get over to the moorings in Marlow. This done, I cleaned assorted wildlife droppings from various parts of the boat and gave the port side a good wash.

The view from our side doors:

Off to Waitrose to replenish stores yet again, we (well Penny really) also had to check out most of the clothes shops in the area, there were quite a few!!

Around 7 our friends Stephen & Tessa appeared, we were off to the George & Dragon for dinner, and very nice it was too. It was also their 23rd wedding anniversary!! Congratulations to them.

Found it a bit tricky getting back to the boat in the dark, one of these days I'll remember to take the torch!!

Today:    10 miles -     4 locks -     4 hours
So Far:   86 miles -   40 locks -    40 hours