The day started out very dull and grey but soon the sun was shining and I was out of the boat helping with the locks. We went through 23 locks today and every one of them was against us!. Thankfully another boater raised our gate paddles on a couple of them as we went through double locks in convoy.

We managed a good turn ourselves in that we found an elderly lady with her boat moored at the bow but her stern drifting outwards. When we asked if we could help she asked if we had a spare ground pin she could buy off us. She only had 2 of these essential items and one of the had just fallen into the canal! We pulled in ahead of her and the man got out with his "fishing" magnet. First thing he caught was a very useful lump hammer in nice conditiion, we needed a second one on board, then he fished out the lady's ground pin.

What fun!

The blip shows the gear mechanism, which we wind with a special handle called a windlass, to lift the paddles to let water into the lock. If we are lucky they are all sticky and greasy like this one - see detail in extra photo.