Don't try this at home

Thrupp to Oxford, 6 miles, 4 locks

Didn't wake until 10:30, I'm guessing it's due of the lack of sleep yesterday. It was grey and miserable outside, but dry, however that wasn't to last and by 12:45 when I set off, the drizzle had already started. I didn't mind, though, because I had only a short way to go before I was in Oxford and it was all going to be plain sailing. I'd removed my chimneys to make sure of that.

The first lock was Roundham Bridge, which is 7'5 (2.3m). It all went without incident, however I didn't fancy climbing down the lock ladder or walking on Oothoon's wet slippery roof, so I bow hauled her out. Then I went under Yarnton Bridge, or at least I would have had the gangplank not caught on the protruding brickwork of the arch. Funnily enough this looks like a huge bridge when you're approaching and the span of the arch looks like you could get a barge under it, however it wasn't to be. Even though my chimney wasn't in an upright position, it still got squashed as the gangplank moved and looks as though it should be crooked.

Next up was Kidlington Green Lock. This looked to be Roundham Bridge all over again, especially as it isn't very deep, but it was made less pleasant by the drizzle having got much heavier. After bow-hauling the boat into the narrows and closing the bottom gate, the wind had caught the prow and it had drifted across the canal. Normally this wouldn't be a problem because you'd just go forward with a bit of turn on the tiller and soon be off, however right in front of the prow was a little rowing boat called The Oak, which was at the end of someone's garden. (Someone's quite large garden, I should point out. Why they didn't lift the boat out of the water and store it upright, where it wouldn't have been in the way of the navigation or full of water, I don't know). With that in the way, I couldn't go forward, so all I could do was try to bring the stern in and turn the prow out. Except that the off-side part of the canal is very shallow and I got grounded front and back. I could move backwards, however that just took me back into the lock's narrows, from where I couldn't manoeuvre, and I still couldn't go forward because of The Oak. It was a completely vexing experience, trying to get Oothoon off the side of the canal while not hitting the little rowing boat and I was really cursing her owner. In the end I reversed into the narrows, jumped ashore with the centre rope and managed to pull the front out enough so that I could attempt to set off, then had a hairy time trying to get back aboard as the stern came out of the narrows and headed away from the bank. Eventually I did it and managed to get away, and without hitting The Oak.

Only a minute or two later, when I had barely got back into the centre of the channel, propulsive power suddenly disappeared. Putting the throttle into reverse didn't make any difference and neither did putting it into full forward. I clearly had something around the propeller, which at least answered yesterday's question about whether the canal is shallow or is it due to stuff round the prop: by now I knew that the answer was 'both'. Fortunately in my fiddling with the throttle I'd somehow pointed the boat towards the bank and was able to jump off and bring Oothoon to a stop. The bank at this point had lovely new piling and judging by the mud had been filled with dredgings from the canal. Nice. After tying up I went below to get changed into something more appropriate for going down a weed hatch and re-emerged to find that the drizzle had become proper rain and heavy too. My last experience down the weed hatch hadn't been a happy one, with me being too large to fit into the hole in the back deck to gain access to it, so there was only one course of action left, which was to lie on my belly out of the engine room and basically dive into the hatch. It's difficult to do because there's no-where to put your head and getting back up is tricky because there's nothing really to push up against. However I'd had a brilliant idea: I figured that I had an underwater camera, so why didn't I take pictures of what was round the prop and then I'd know what I was dealing with. Well the theory was certainly fine and the camera worked perfectly, however I think that the people who designed it assumed you'd be snorkelling off the coast of Cyprus or perhaps in the Bahamas, not in a canal in England in the rain. The pictures were useless, with abstract splodges of colour against murk. One had a shadow which could have been a propeller if you were desperate to believe that, but basically it was hopeless.

A grope around the propeller revealed two things: firstly that the bit of rope that I hadn't managed to get off the last time was still there, but much much larger; and secondly, that there was some wire wrapped around the shaft, which is what I assume was stopping it from turning. As I was dangling down into the hatch, I used my cheapo Wilkinson's one-handed saw thing to good effect and managed to get the rope off after several minutes of struggling. I was dreading having to cut through the wire, but to my delight pulling on one end of it rotated the propeller and it came away easily. A quick check confirmed that there were no further obstructions on the prop shaft, so I put everything back together and went below to get changed again. In an attempt to avoid the mud, I tried walking along the gunwale, but it was much too wet and I slipped off into the mud. My map book, which I had intended to take indoors to turn the page, fell out of my hand and down the gap between the boat and the bank, and I just managed to reach down and grab it in its waterproof house, before it would have disappeared. Once inside I considered putting my waterproofs on, but I realised that the clothes I had been originally wearing were so wet that I might as well continue to wear them.

The trip down the weed hatch had cost me 35 minutes, but at least now I knew that if there was no power, it was due to the canal and I could hear it scraping along the bottom from time to time. Eventually I came across the first of the day's lift bridges—the Drinkwater lift bridge—and was just angling to come in for a landing to tackle it when a cyclist appeared around the disused railway bridge just after it and offered to do it for me. I couldn't believe my luck.

Duke's lock went straightforwardly and as I was leaving I saw the only other boat I'd seen move all day—a hire boat with an American family on it, who were asking how long to get to Thrupp. It was a little after 4pm by this time, so I said that it was an hour or two and that they might make it before sundown. 

There's major construction work taking place by the A34 bridge, with the navigation controlled by Stop/Go boards as there's a hydraulic lifting platform straddling the canal. Just before it is another lift bridge, however as I approached, one of the workmen from the construction site was walking past the end and lifted it for me. Again I'd been lucky, but surely this couldn't last.

In fact it didn't, with me having to do the next lift bridge—Perry's lift bridge—myself. Except that I failed. I could lift it up a little bit and could get it to, say, knee height, but I couldn't get a pole underneath it and I couldn't raise it higher without being right next to the edge. I tried leveraging it open by putting my pole on a nearby bollard, but all my attempts failed. It looked like this was the end of the line. I was going to be stuck here until another boat came along with more crew. Just then, I noticed a man walking towards me under an umbrella. He was smiling and asked me if I needed a hand with the bridge. He then explained that this was a tricky bridge to do and that I stood no chance because my pole was too long. He also explained that I was lucky in that you could lift this bridge single-handed and that some of the others definitely needed two. We chatted for a bit and then I noticed Oothoon drifting away from the shore, so I ran back to catch her and the man with the brolly opened the bridge. After I went through and he'd lowered the bridge, I saw him walking back from where he'd come. I asked if he was on one of the boats moored there and he said that he was, and that he'd watched my antics through the window before deciding to come and help. He also said that there were no more lift bridges to do before I got to Oxford, which was a huge relief.

Wolvercote lock was easy enough except that there wasn't all that much daylight left and I had a couple of miles to go before I reached the end of the canal. I put a bit of a spurt on, but still slowed down for moored boats, although clearly not enough for one grumpy woman who was just returning to her boat and who complained that I hadn't slowed down at all. By the time I reached the Electric Lift Bridge, which seems to have been replaced by a proper road bridge as part of a modern housing scheme, it was really starting to get dark and by the time I got to the site of the former boatyard at Jericho and the end of the canal, it was properly dark. Nicholson's says that there are visitor moorings at the end of the 1/4 mile part of the canal that extends by Isis lock; what it doesn't tell you is that if you go down there you can't wind if you're over 30ft and that the winding hole above Isis lock only accepts 50ft boats. Not wishing to go down there to find it was full and then having to reverse out in the dark, I moored by a kind of weir just before the winding hole. There were a couple of other boats there, so I assumed it was okay, but although the front of the boat was on decent bank, the back was rather dangling out in the canal due to the bank having subsided.

Once I was tied up, that was it. There was no way I was mucking about on the canal-side gunwale to reattach chimneys so I went Inside and into warm clothing, with tacos for dinner because I wanted comfort food. It had been a hard day, even though it had only been short, with the rain and wind really making the going rough. I was so exhausted that I couldn't even face writing up my blog.