Well, after two days of blistering heat we started Saturday with torrential rain which didn’t let up till after lunch. We laid low till it stopped, then set off at about 2.00pm.
We hadn’t been travelling more than 15 minutes when our way was blocked by the fallen branch of a willow tree – well, more like half a tree, split off from its parent and lying across the canal, luckily in one of the conservation areas where no boats were moored and no one had been passing underneath. A boater first on the scene on the other side said he’d phoned BW an hour and a half before, and was pulling leaves and small branches out of the water. With persistence, he scraped his boat through, but we realised we’d have no chance with Albion, we couldn’t get within a yard of the bank even to moor. We too rang BW’s emergency line and were promised a call back. Luckily, College Cruisers, just back down the canal into Oxford had five hire boats due to set out (they too had phoned BW about the problem) and decided to tackle it themselves. Using Albion to access the tree, with Ira moving the boat forward and backwards as required, they set about with saws and ropes and, with the help of the ever increasing crowd of boaters (stacking up on both sides, mostly hire boats) and gongoozlers, bit by bit the obstruction was cleared out of the canal and onto the towpath. By the time Cal got a call back from the BW engineer(?) the work had been done and we were able to get boats through – first two hire boats, then Albion, to great cheers.
The afternoon's entertainment
Helping
The dogs meanwhile were out on the towpath having a whale of a time and entertaining the onlookers with their antics. They were entranced by all the messing about with sticks in the water and in the end Zep couldn’t resist, he jumped in and dragged out a huge branch, to cheers of his own. By the time we’d filled up with water after the next bridge and cleared the willow twigs and leaves off the prop, we’d had enough, and moored in the shrubbery that passes for the Wolvercote moorings – having taken over three hours to travel two miles. We don’t know when, or if, the BW man did turn up, but had it not been for the DIY approach there would have been a lot of unhappy hirers today.
