Laleham to Teddington, 12.75 miles, 4 locks
A look out of the window and the sky is grey, however there's a brighter patch over there and maybe the forecast for rain is wrong. Whatever it's going to do, it's too good to waste and after a celebratory breakfast of mushrooms, bacon and scrambled egg, I top up the engine's water (again) and set off.
After a while there's the M3 motorway bridge. I moored here last year on the way up the Thames with my friend Jan, so we could go to The Kingfisher pub for lunch. I think it was raining when we went in, but sunny when we came out and I remember that the mooring was interesting because you can't actually moor under the bridge as there's nothing to attach to, so we were tied to some bushes or something.
After the bridge there's Chertsey lock and the river does a crazy detour, then you're going past Pharaoh's Island. It's all lovely housing round here. Next is Shepperton Lock and once you're through that, there's the choice of the Thames ahead or the River Wey to the right. I wanted to go down the Wey last year, but there wasn't time. If circumstances were different I might have gone down now, but I really want to get back to London, so I press on. There's another impressive 'bypass' just after D'Oyly Carte island, where a large bit of river is avoided by Desborough Cut, then you're going past Walton on Thames. It's a nice straight stretch of river and it's strange to see everyone going about their business. I keep forgetting that today is Sunday and for everyone else it's the weekend.
After Walton there's Sunbury locks. The right-hand one is electrified and is normally used, whereas the left-hand one is manual and (I later found) has no bottom gates at the moment. The lock keeper had just gone for lunch, so I tie up and go to operate the lock, hoping that there's power. There is; but although the lock is full I can't get the top gates to open. I try raising and lowering the paddles, and even go to the other control panel to make sure that the bottom paddles are properly shut. In the end the gates deign to open, meanwhile another narrowboat has turned up and one of the crew volunteers to operate the lock. They're based at Godalming on the River Wey and are just having a trip to Kingston for some shopping, which sounds like a nice way to do things. We're soon through the lock and I leave them to close the gates and follow.
By the time we get to Molesey lock, the lock keepers are back from lunch and do it for us. After Molesey lock the river is dominated by Hampton Court Palace, which looks fantastic. They've even guilded some of the gates on the river side and it shines brilliantly in the sun, which has come out especially. After Hampton Court the river is full of little sailing boats, as there appear to be a lot of sailing clubs along this stretch of river and this continues even as you go through the middle of Kingston upon Thames, with people whizzing round and ducking as the sails flop from side to side as they tack along the river. I'm quite glad to leave them all behind, because I can't manoeuvre out of the way if they get it wrong. Before I know it I can see large weirs and there's Teddington lock.
I'm still tying up when there's a couple from n.b. Daisy at the back deck asking if I'm going to Brentford. I say that I am and they ask whether I've booked passage. I haven't, not knowing when I was going to get here, but they say that they've called ahead to try to book and that the next tide is at 5pm! I'm a bit alarmed by this, because if we went on it, it would mean that we'd be leaving in the dark. Apparently the alternative is the tide at 3am, which is equally dark. I say that I'll go and talk to the lock keeper and see what he says. Sure enough, the next tide is at 17:00, which would mean leaving at 16:30—a mere 40 minutes away. As I haven't booked passage with British Waterways, who operate the locks at Brentford, I'll need to give them a ring. The lock keeper tries, but gets no answer and he explains that in the off-season they only go in if someone has booked; and that you need to do it 24 hours in advance. He gives me a set of tide tables and Brentford's phone number, and says to come back when we need to lock.
I return to "Daisy" to tell them what has happened. Until the passage is confirmed by the Brentford lock keeper, none of us are going anywhere, since you need to be sure that the lock will be open. I call Brentford and leave a message on the answering machine saying that I want passage, but then we wait. The couple explain that an additional wrinkle is that the Thames gets drained between Teddington and Richmond for the month of November, so once that happens we won't be able to go anyway. I can't quite figure out how that can happen, especially when the lock keeper has explained that all the rain that fell yesterday is on its way down from the Midlands and that the water levels are rising, which frankly gives me the jitters. Neither of us have heard anything by 16:20 so we figure that at least it won't be tonight, but I guess there's a chance that the lock keeper might call in the early hours of the morning.
I go back to Oothoon and try to make sense of everything. By a combination of looking at the tide tables and the BBC web site, I construct a table of tide times, departure times, arrival times and sunrise/sunset times. Unless we want to transit to Brentford and arrive in the dark, the earliest we can go is Wednesday morning, when the sun will have risen 20 minutes before we get there, but there's this business of the Thames being drained. In the end I figure out what's happening: the Environment Agency run the river to just below Teddington, British Waterways run Brentford locks and the Port of London Authority run the river between the two, but they're all separate and don't seem to talk to each other. The 'draining' is done by the Port of London and is for five weeks starting on November 8th, and what it means is that the weirs will be left open at Richmond. Normally the weirs are closed, except for a couple of hours before and after high tide, to ensure that the water levels in the river are kept high; with the weirs open, the stretch from Teddington to Brentford will have no water at low-tide and will be somewhat below normal levels at high-tide. If I understand it right, it shouldn't affect the transit of a narrowboat, since that can only go at high tide anyway, so as long as there's enough water left to get us into the lock at Brentford, we'll be fine.
What a mess. I can't believe that I've got this far only to get caught out by the tides. I decide that I don't want to cook, so head over to The Angler's on the other side of the river, for some dinner and to have a think. I've got most of the things I need for the river: an anchor and a VHF radio, but I don't have navigation lights. Funnily enough I'd bought some battery-powered ones in the chandlers at Uxbridge before I set off back in August but I don't have the right kind of battery to power them. If I need to be on the 3am tide, I won't have time to get any before then either. I've put the radio on charge, so that should be ready by the time I get back and while it has a built-in Garmin navigation GPS, I've never bought the charts for the Thames because I could never figure out which of the umpteen formats that Garmin offer is the right one (the radio is made by Uniden so Garmin don't list it). I don't want to be going down the river blind, especially as I need to make an 'instrument' landing at Brentford, but then it occurs to me that I could use Google Maps on the iPhone I rashly bought while I was in Banbury. If I connected it to the mains, so it didn't run out of power, I could use the built-in GPS to show my position on the moving map, so at least I'd know where I was. If I traced the route before I set off, Google Maps would even have the map data cached, so it wouldn't matter if there wasn't a great mobile phone signal. This had to be worth a try.
Back at Oothoon I had another look at the navigation lights. I couldn't work out what size of battery they needed, but all they had for illumination was a little torch bulb. I wondered if there was some way to power that from the boat's 12v system, which got me thinking about all the spare Ikea LED lights I still had lying around. I wondered whether I could somehow use those. Taking the coloured cover off one of the lights and holding it up to the LED lights I'd installed already, I could see that they were almost exactly the same size. If I could take the cover off the LED lights, maybe something could be done. I disassembled one of the unused LED lights and took the diffuser off the front, and was amazed to find that it fitted into the navigation light perfectly. I could even do it up so that the cover went up to the rubber seal to make it waterproof. All I'd need to do was drill a small hole to let the wire though, connect it to the same power supply as the tunnel light uses, and I'd have a starboard navigation light. Excitedly I put all the bits together and went outside to see how to fit it. Mounting was easy, since I could attach it to the fold-down step that is on each side, and the incident with the tree in Sheepwash Cut turned out to have a silver lining, because instead of the pure wire that had gone to the tunnel lights previously, there was now a screw connector block that the nav. lights could connect to. Thinking that this was all too easy, I attached the mounting bracket to the step with tie-wraps (or 'twistys', as they call them in the US) then wired up my hacked light. Flipping the switch, I was delighted when both the tunnel light and the nav light lit up—and really brightly too. The cable was just long enough to reach to the step and voila! I did the same to the red light for the port side and that worked too. Figuring that the cable-entry hole had stopped them being weatherproof, I tied a knot in the cable inside the housing as a strain relief, then put silicone sealant on the outside. Not fantastic, but probably good enough for the time it needed to work.
The rear nav light was going to be more of an issue as there's no power out back. Hard to believe when there's the entire engine room there, but I guess there's no call for it. I had a look around and found a couple of wires poking out of a hole in the side panel and was pleased to find that they were live. Unfortunately in doing this, I'd somehow removed the wire's insulation and as I investigated there was the occasional spark. I managed to get the strands apart, but it was quite alarming really. Assuming that I'm not on the 3am tide tomorrow morning (please make that be so) then I'll try to tidy them up tomorrow. Funny that I should want there to be power, but then be dismayed when there is.
I guess all there's left to do now is wait to hear from the Brentford lock keeper.
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