Last nights mooring
Weather is not to bad this morning but a definite chill in the air, winters coming and looking at the abundance of fruit and berries on the trees along the canal side it could be a cold one.
We have four locks to tackle before we leave the Aylesbury arm, the end lock is a staircase lock this means that the top lock fills the bottom lock.When you are travelling through a staircase you need to think about the direction of the water flow. This is because when you arrive at the bottom of a three-lock staircase, just as a boat coming the other way has left the bottom lock; whereas at a single locks this would be is good news, as you can go in and fill up the lock; with a staircase the top two locks will also be empty so there is no water to fill the bottom lock. You must fill the top two locks before filling the bottom lock otherwise you will not have enough water to take you to the top. This helps to explain why staircase locks need more water; it needs two locks full of water to get to the top where one lock-full from the summit level would suffice on flights composed of single locks, no matter how long the flight. If the staircase had four or five locks there would be three or four locks to be filled using even more water. If you follow another boat up the staircase all the locks are full, you can just empty the bottom lock, enter and fill each lock as you progress up the flight. This is easier and uses only one lock of water instead of two.
A bit of what the canal was originally used for.
On the GU we have five locks to operate these are double locked but we travel up the locks by ourselves though and only pass two other boats who travel the other direction. We pass the village of Marsworth and its reservoir that sits adjacent to the canal, here the wind is blowing and makes steering the boat a bit difficult, and then it a right turn onto another arm of this canal.
Wendover arm is a narrow beam canal and originally terminated at Wendover and over six miles long, but unfortunately we can only travel just over a mile to a place called Little Tring here the rest of the canal bed is dry, at the moment though as the Wendover Arm Trust are in the process of opening this canal. http://www.wendoverarmtrust.co.uk/
We moor at the basin and have a afternoon of doing nothing, before settling down for the night and the last episode of " Utopia".
The last couple of days we have been like the Ancient Mariner but we here he had an albatross we have had a Tern following ours boat, today he was following us and dived into the canal and came back up with a fish in its beak not once but twice.
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