Napton to Newbold

From our moorings at Napton, Barney and I walked around the canal and up Napton hill past the windmill:

Having rather slowly worked our way along the (southern) Oxford canal, we decided we had better get moving if we were going to reach our destination before we had to hand the boat back, so today has been a bit of a marathon.

From just past Napton, we joined the Grand Union Canal to Braunston, then headed north again back on the Oxford Canal again. Braunston was busy (even though we avoided most of it), being a sunny bank holiday Sunday.

One of the subplots of mooring early yesterday was to give the hire boats a chance to settle down before we returned to the water. Unfortunately, today was a BAD day for hire boats. Mostly near misses (and amusing amount of engine use - one of them looked like it was trying to be a jet-ski from the amount of spray from the back), but one managed to hit Vagabond quite hard. Only a bit of paint missing thankfully...

Apart from the hire boats, the morning went very well, and we managed to get 12 miles to just before the Hillmorton locks:

However the locks were SLOW; lots of day boats and people not knowing what they were doing (and the middle lock had only one lock functional, and that was slow because the top gate leaked so much), so we spent the best part of 2 hours getting through the three locks.

Then we got stuck behind the slowest boat we've ever seen on the canals - going past other boats, it went so slowly that I had to take the engine out of gear most of the time, which made maneuvering rather difficult. But eventually, we reached Newbold, and are now moored up in the sunshine trying to decide if we should go to the pub or just relax on the boat.

17.5 miles and 3 locks today.