Bartimaeus

Shane and I have been through the Harecastle Tunnel before, but Bryn hadn’t.This time through we were the first boat in and led the way. The boater behind had told us he has been through many times and mostly he gets there the day before , without booking and goes through first. He had been a ship captain for 40 years, before starting boating.

Tunnels can be drippy so we did have waterproofs on. It had already been raining quite heavily before we got into the tunnel.I  felt a bit guilty that our seating allowed me to swivel round and get my legs out of an oncoming stream of drips, we could see approaching. Bryn couldn’t and though he tried to move he still got wet socks.

I tried going down the front to get better pictures and give him more space for dodging. I don’t think there was another dripping that large though. I didn’t get any good pictures anyway, but one thing that is different about the Harecastle tunnel is that the doors are closed at each end so, as Bryn noticed, there is no light at the end of the tunnel. As you approach the other end a door opens and you can see light.

This picture makes it looks sunny when it is really just the contrast of the dark and light. In fact it was raining but there were mooring rings in a short distance and we were able to get moored quickly before the serious rain started.

We enjoyed a walk around the pond right beside us. We saw pochards and a gold finch and some pigeons seem to come in close to Shane’s head a couple of times. The usual array of water birds were there, swans, geese, mallards, coots and moorhens. I am fond of the moorhens but they are often shy and swim off. They rarely come for feeding. Today though there were a few tamer ones, but even then they were in retreat.

We decided not to go further as weather is better tomorrow so I progressed my two knitting projects. Bryn and I planned more changes to the Roman shield and think we are happy with the third version and now to put out to some other test knitters, who might do a better job than me.

I am feeling like I might soon be able to share the pattern, though a written version may take me longer than Bryn takes to chart it and even than me knitting it, but not every knitter likes a chart, but I know it will work and I am glad to have managed it while Bryn is still with us. 

Better weather forecast tomorrow so we can progress to some locks without worrying about getting too wet or cold.