Dragonfly sculpture at top of Hatton flight and Southern Hawker with “Rachel”, hire boat from Kate boats at top of Hatton Flight

We left Warwick early as we knew we had 23 locks ahead of us D on tiller. Starting with Cape locks, these are big and hard to work, a mile or so further on the Hatton flight begins. This is a chain of 21 locks which get closer together as you get nearer the top. As these are broad locks you really want someone else travelling with you as it is much quicker and a lot less work. No one in sight as we started and all locks set against us. After six locks we saw someone following us and waited for them. It was the hire boat mentioned above. This was their fourth trip so some experience but not much. Once they joined us we moved much faster and soon after J took tiller. A few locks later we finally saw someone coming the other way who confirmed what we thought, there was another boat ahead of us (explaining why all the locks were set against us). Soon after a lock keeper appeared and set the rest of the locks for us, speeding our passage even more. We took five hours from Kate boats to the top of Hatton, not record breaking but better than we had hoped. It was fortunate too as it started to rain soon after we moored and hailed later.

After all that hard work we had a quiet afternoon and only did a short cruise to Kingswood junction the next day, where we visited Baddesley Clinton (NT property) and did a few chores.