When we reached Bow Locks, I continued up the river to Three Mills while waiting for a locking. When I returned I could see no one waiting, and thought I’d missed my turn, but rounding the corner found us waiting for another two locks.

I wanted to do the “Bow Back River”, another course of the River Lee which has two locks onto the tidal sections again. We stopped at Carpenters Road Lock to have a look around (City Road lock was a building site). The curved guillotine gates were interesting, and it all seems in place, so it could be restored quite easily I would have thought. I notice that all this area will become the Olympic village if we get the games in 2012. In a way a shame, as it will wipe out large amounts of history, however most of it is not very pretty.

I thought Dad might want to do a bit more cruising while he was down here, so we went up the River Lee to Waltham Abbey. We caught up with another boat off the cruise who was taking his boat back to Bishop Stortford after a couple of locks, but we stopped for lunch at Ponders End lock. We continued alone up to Waltham Abbey, and after emptying the loo we turned above the lock, and moored up.

Continued below...

Thursday 20th Jan 2005

Just as we were going down Waltham Town Lock, a working pair selling diesel approached from below. We stopped and took on 120 litres of fuel at 36p a litre. Since I filled on 30 Dec, and had the heater on nearly non-stop from the 3rd Jan and did a lot of cruising I’m not really sure if it’s good or not, but I wasn’t expecting it to be as low.

At Enfield Lock Dad needed to use his BW key to open the bottom gates, only to find he had left them at the last lock! I thought it would be a good idea to turn the boat around, and drive back up there, but as it turned out it wasn’t all that far, not much more than a mile, so it was a waste of time. Dad managed to get his keys back though, but I could not turn the boat around. Wooden barriers had been placed where the River leaves the canal, and therefore made it impossible to get around especially since the towpath side was to shallow, and there was a strong wind. I ended up backing up the whole distance, and working through the lock backwards.

We had a cold, but good run down to Limehouse, where I wanted to stay the night. The wind was getting stronger throughout the day, and by the time we tied up on the visitor moorings we could not stop the boat banging. The wall there has really deep section piles, and then to top it off a lump of wood to bring it out even further. I tried the fenders higher on the cabin sides, but that didn’t work, and eventually we moved over to an empty bit of floating pontoon in the marina bit which improved things greatly.

Continued...

Friday 21st Jan 2005

I went to the river with my camera to take a picture of the entrance to compare it with the film “Painted Boats”. As I did a narrowboat, “Arthur Dent” left to head downstream. Not sure where he was bound – maybe South Dock.

We had a good but quiet run up the locks, we met a tug pushing a pan going the other way. He was leaving both bottom gates, and paddles up, at each lock, but after City Road lock, they were all full, so we must have been following someone. I thought I could see a boat through the Islington tunnel, but I thought we might have caught them up at Camden.

We stopped in Paddington Basin again, and a friend of mine, Andy Beale, visited on his way home, back to Reading.

Continued...