Rowkin Rovings Blog

Our cruising plan today was to leave Ratho where we had stayed the night and bid the Bridge Inn a fond farewell.

It was such a nice mooring spot and had some little hidden gems about it.

These steps were across the road from the Bridge Inn and we would advice anyone not to try to negotiate them if one had imbibed in some alcoholic beverage. One photo we wanted to get but missed, was of the two local swans. These guys were humongous. We had never seen swans so large and you didn’t want to do battle with them. We think they were only that big because they ate from the bag door of the Bridge Inn which had a Michelin star.

What an experience it was today on the canal. We knew that there was a forecast for windy weather and passing showers, but what we got was gale force winds with ice shards for rain. It had to be some of the worse conditions we have experienced on the canals.

We were checking in on the weather regularly and it changed from windy to windy with a red bar meaning extreme.

It took all your effort to hang onto the tiller and try to keep the boat in what one might consider a straight line. We had the engine fully cranked up to combat the wind and were only just making very slow progress forwards.

We came upon this group of kayakers which consisted of kids about 10 years of age. They looked cold and bedraggled and very envious of up being dry.

Even the day trip tourist boats didn’t make an effort to come out and play.

This video just does not do the conditions justice. You might also want to turn the volume down as the noise of the wind is not pleasant to hear – then again, you can listen to Di cackling her head off.

We’ve not come across one of these machines very often before.

From a distance, it looks like a tractor on water but it is a weed cutter and picker-upper.

You do need to keep a degree of the weed as it does help to stabilise the banks but not too much that is fouls up boat propellers.

We would have given our eye teeth for just a fraction of the power that this machine had. It was a day of constantly fighting the wind and crouching under umbrellas which were turned inside out.

We did make a reasonable distance today but only by cruising for seven hours.