A Highlight of 1998

Preparing Corinna for another Season

May - Back on the canals We left home to enter the canals on the first day of our license as the floods abated. The trip up to Oxford took twice as long as usual and was through a mixture of red and yellow boards. We counted the bricks going by under several bridges and spent several minutes flat out in the narrow gut above Abingdon bridge - it must have been running at close to 5 mph. We were very relieved to get off the Thames onto the canals and we think we were only the second narrowboat to make it up as the floods reduced. We stopped at some friends in Banbury and saw their pictures of the Easter period and it was even worse than we had heard - the same when we got to Tewksbury and up the Avon where there were still boats in fields and bits of caravans everywhere.

The trip up the Oxford, Coventry and on to the Trent and Mersey is well known to us and we have a few favorite and regular stops. The first was at Newbold on Avon to play the game of bar skittles which is a game unique to Northamptonshire. It is played by throwing "cheeses" a wood or plastic puck at the 9 skittles which are in a sort of leather armchair - great fun. The next regular stop was to see friends who have Hoo Mill, sadly now only a house, which is on the Trent close to the Canal. John and Babs took over Soaring Oxford - the glider, motor glider and now aircraft business we used to jointly own. After a memorable evening and less memorable awakening Pauline left for a Teaching run home and John took me out to the airfield for a flight in the Grob G115. I ought to have known better than think I was just a passenger - John turned onto the runway, opened the throttle, crossed his arms and said its all yours. I was climbing through 800 feet before I found where the ASI and altimeter were! A very pleasant run round and it all came back quite quickly after many years - even the first landing was tolerable especially so as I have only flown tail-draggers before.

I then continued single handed up to Stoke-on-Trent. On Pauline's return we did the last stretch through the narrow and nearly two mile long Harecastle tunnel up to David Piper's boatyard at Red Bull Basin at Kidsgrove. Corinna was pulled out for us to clean up the bottom (8 hours with a pressure hose) and put on a few coats of Comastic - a fancy sort of bitumen to protect her for another couple of years.