We left Warwick on Wednesday (07/07/2021) morning and chugged through Royal Leamington Spa. At 7am the Festival of San Fermin should have started on the 7th day of the 7th month for the Running of the Bulls in Pamplona, but this year it has been cancelled due to coronavirus. Steve participated in this crazy event in 1991.
We had eight locks and one double staircase lock on our route today. We teamed up with narrowboat Bezique from Goldstone (Shropshire), which a couple had bought for their daughter to live on in London. It is easier to negotiate wide locks with 2 boats side by side. They were taking 2 weeks holiday to collect the boat and deliver it to central London.
The Bascote Lock Flight comprises of four locks two of which are Grand Union Canal staircase locks (numbers 14 and 15). Canal stair case Locks were cheaper to build and can acheive a greater drop in a short space than standard canal locks. These Bascote Staircase Locks share the centre gate - with the upper gate of one lock also being the lower gate of the other.
We got to Long Itchington and decided that we had had enough locks for today and would leave the 8 Stockton Locks for tomorrow. We moored opposite the Blue Lias pub but we didn’t go in, wrongly assuming it would be full of riotous football fans watching England beat Denmark 2-1 with a dodgy penalty in Euro 2020.
On Thursday morning (08/07/2021) we were up with the lark for an early start into the calorie-burning daily lock quota.
The three Calcutt Locks followed the eight Stockton Locks and we remained paired with Bezique.
With four of us and a C&RT volunteer we moved efficiently through the wide locks. We passed a boat with a Triumph motorbike on the bow.
We turned left at Napton Junction, moving off the Grand Union Canal for a short bit on the Oxford Canal.
Headed down to Braunston, intending to pass through it, fearing that it could be log-jammed this weekend if the Braunston Narrowboat Festival wasn’t cancelled.
We stopped for lunch in the middle of nowhere and to wait for Darrol, our engineer, to come out and fix problems with our battery charging system. He failed to find us before he was called to attend to his son, Jamie, who had been injured in an accident at his school. His visit was postponed to the next day when we would be somewhere more accessible.
We left our tranquil remote mooring and continued towards Braunston Junction.
We passed some odd live-aboard narrowboat characters.
We reached Braunston Junction and turned right onto the Grand Union Canal again.
We moored up on the approach to Norton Junction after passing through the six Braunston wide locks and the 2042 yard long Braunston Tunnel, which took us half an hour of dark, gloomy passage.
Next morning we would move down to the actual junction. Tomorrow we would get made ship-shape and Bristol Fashion by Darrol before continuing for the 89 and a quarter miles to Brentford on the River Thames in West London.
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