With the hot weather burning down and turning the top of the boat into scorching metal, we set off early each morning with coffees, 2 pints of squash each and layered up with sunscreen and insect repellent. Sadly, those glasses of squash kept turning into protein shakes as the midges loved to bathe in them! We were heading out from Newbury Manor Marina (which is also where we bought this boat in 2009) on what turned out to be a big marina hop.

The K & A has a very natural feel, with shallow edges and reed beds which look lovely for spotting wildlife but not so good for mooring. The shallow sides also make you liable to run aground when passing other boaters and having to use a gang plank when you moor up for the night. From past experience, we also have a scythe to create a safe nettle free zone around the gang plank. This allows sting free access the boat, especially for those of us with bare feet.

Mooring challenges are one reason some people will just avoid this canal. Some will start onto it and then turn around at the first winding hole. The locks are big, heavy and sometimes a little cranky (pardon the pun) but if you’re lucky, like we were, you get to share several of them with a friendly boater or find some lovely CRT Volunteers to help you out. Pairing up with another boat is especially helpful if you find a leaky lock that needs at least two if not three people to open it!

We had a decision to make on this leg of our travels. Over the next seven months we have a lot of land-based trips planned which would mean either finding short term moorings or leaving the boat unattended and having to zap back to move it every two weeks (we have a continuous cruiser license). This was going to be challenging and there was a much easier (but slightly expensive) option, to take a winter mooring in a marina for seven months!

It would be the first time in over four years that we’d have a permanent base and be able to use our car instead of relying on our feet and public transport to get to see relatives (I do actually quite enjoy the long train journeys, especially if they don’t get cancelled, run on time and I have a comfy seat!). We opted for plan B and after a series of phone calls found a marina that could accommodate us for the following week! So we needed to get a wiggle on before any locks broke or water shortages stopped us from getting there.

Mooring up in Kintbury on the 12th August we found an excellent spot to view this year’s partial solar eclipse and ended up sharing our safety glasses with half the residents of Kintbury who came to join us on the bridge! It was wonderful to just watch the expression on each person’s face change as they put the glasses on, there was a real WOW factor! Mind you I had to hustle a few people to let me have them back so I could see the progress again!

After very luckily finding an overnight spot at Devizes Wharf we planned to make an early start to head down the Caen Hill Flight. This was going to be a tough day and neither of us were looking forward to it even though we have done it many times before. The actual main flight has 16 locks with very short pounds between them, but there are 7 locks before them and 6 locks after that have to be done in one run, totalling 29 big locks in about a 2 mile stretch of canal! To say I was anxious about this is an understatement. I was dreading it, convinced that something was going to go wrong. I’d hoped to arrive at this section on a weekend so that we’d possibly get some help from the CRT volunteers, but it took us an extra day to get past the 11 miles of moored boats around Pewsey so we’d arrived a day later than planned.

 

 

Getting a government alert about the risk of fires didn’t particularly help to calm my nerves.

 

 

So it was 7.30am on an overcast (and thankfully cooler) Monday morning that we went into the Top Lock at Devizes and apart from low water levels in some of the pounds we got through the first 6 locks without any issues. As we arrived at the last lock before the big flight, we were met by the glorious sight of…. CRT Volunteers; I was so relieved that the smile on my face must have been as big as a Cheshire Cat’s! It turns out that these locks have a dedicated team of volunteers for EVERY day of the week. The Monday Team are a great bunch of guys who got us through the middle section of 16 locks in just 2 hours. We weren’t rushing as there were lots of conversations to be had; I particularly enjoy finding out the past careers of these retirees as they are usually quite diverse from CEOs to Social Workers. We completed the 29th lock of the day just shy of 5 hours from when we’d originally set off and I for one, couldn’t have been happier.

The marina we are booked into was now within easy reach and this western end of the K&A is going to be our home for the next 7 months. It’s a beautiful stretch that passes through the southern end of the Cotswolds with one or two favourite spots as it meanders its way along to Bristol.