Our first cruise since... blimey, was it that long ago?

Just two days ago, I was amusing myself wandering around the marina taking photos. "Blogography" was the mindset, and there were only three photos that were worth posting.

The weekend was wet and windy again, and we were looking for a weather window which lent itself to a comfortable boating experience. On Monday, it rained hard in the late afternoon, but the sky was worth it.

And then Tuesday morning hinted at the possibility that we might enjoy the first outing on Kantara since August last year. That long! So off we went. Nothing too adventurous, just a paddle down to Welford Junction to do some repairs to various chips and scratches on the paintwork.

The marina's resident swans were out, having blurry photos taken.

The weather was good to us, and the canal was... well, it was a bit the worse for lack of use, I think. There were a few places where dredging would be appropriate, and a lot of places where reeds were intruding far too much into the width of the cut. But of course, CRT have been hit by the virus just as badly as everyone else, and simply haven't been able to get done the volume of work they normally do. We were very happy just to put up with it!

Mooring a few hundred yards away from Welford Junction, we were subjected to the worst wind I can remember; off-side and very strong, such that we found it extremely difficult to bring Kantara in to moor her. We managed eventually, but it was touch-and-go for a while, and the wind remained that way for the rest of the afternoon, so we didn't manage to make any kind of a start on the work.

But, hey. Who cares? It was so good to be out again.

There just were few others there when we arrived.

It's a truly lovely place to be.

And then the wind died, and we set about washing, scraping away flaky paint, sanding, and priming all down one side of the hull. We weren't dealing with very much that was more than just superficial, so it didn't take us too long.

Before...


...and after!


And as we worked, lots of boats passed, coming and going, mooring and leaving, and several stayed for the night. And as we sat alongside the towing path, watching paint dry and celebrating with a couple of pints, we enjoyed the sun and the simple beauty of our mooring.

The next morning, the weather forecast said we were to expect high temperatures, which would not have been best for painting, so we started early while it was still relatively cool. Sanding and top coating the hull was the order of the day. We had the whole stretch of mooring to ourselves.

The hull before the topcoat...

and after!

I took the cratch cover off  to brush away dozens of dead flies and vacated spider cocoons that had accumulated in the nooks and corners over the past months, years, and to give a good cleaning to all of the steel and woodwork that had been under the cover.

The quiet of our day was punctuated regularly by a light aircraft towing gliders to their release altitude.

And again at the end of the day, we rested and just took it all in.

And this morning, we set off, smiling, back to the marina. We have a plan!

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