Finally getting my blog going, a bit late I know but we have to start somewhere. The plan to do this from the first day  went awry as about two hours into our adventure and halfway down a flight of locks known as Stockton locks the throttle cable broke. Now a flight of locks is not a great place to have any sort of breakdown. We weren’t without power but could only move at tickover, which isn’t great in a lock. So we called out the equivalent of the RAC and travelled down through three locks controlling the boat with ropes. So instead of getting to our planned mooring we were about 45 minutes behind, really tired and hungry. The engineer came and all was fixed by eight thirty that evening.

Day 2 started cloudy but OK and with everything working again we set of from near the Blue Lias pub in Long Itchington. Fortunately we travelled through most of the locks on our way to Leamington Spa with another experienced crew on a shared ownership boat, which made the trip easier, particularly good as it really started to rain. We moored just east of Leamington for lunch then pressed on in the rain to Warwick, mooring near Kate boats, known to Clare and Mel as the place we towed our friends boat B-Hive back to on the first trip they did with us as the “A” crew. By then we were fed up of the rain so had decided not to go on through the locks in Warwick, leaving them to do on Wednesday, which doesn’t sound terrible except on Wednesday we were going to be doing the infamous Hatton flight.