Cruising the Kennet and Avon (K & A)

We disentangled ourselves from breasting up at our mooring in Reading. I moved off across the shallow water towards the centre of the canal with a minimum of fuss. Kevin and Carol in NB Dunslavin had a little more trouble having been the closest boat to the bank, eventually sliding across the mud and weed and into slightly deeper water. Our first day of cruising on the K & A and we were heading for Aldermaston.

We moved out of the bypass on to the canal proper and almost immediately came to a traffic light controlled section of the canal, with the red traffic light glowing brightly our way. A press of the button and straight away green meant GO! We cruised through quite a pleasant part of Reading, shops and cafes built around the waterway with lots of small kids watching the boats go by. I said in my last post how well catered for Reading was for shopping and we hadn't even made it to this part of the city!

It took a little time to get use to being back on what is essentially a canal, this part of the K & A being mainly the navigable parts of the River Kennet joined together with canals, generally the canal sections were placed where a lock was required (to move boats up or down). The way ahead was always well defined, making sure no one knowingly steered their boat into the weir.

It was a pleasant day for cruising, not so many sights along the way today. The widebeam boat we met from the opposite direction, as expected, on a narrower part of the canal, took some work to get by. Murphy's Law says you will always meet other boats at locks, bridges, blind corners and narrow parts of the canal! The person on the front of the widebeam shouted to me that they have a 3 foot draft so they couldn't move over too far. I agreed that that maybe the case but if they didn't move over no one was going anywhere (or words to that effect), there was simply no more room. The scenery along the way was excellent.

You always seem to come across something different when you are cruising, in this case a grass lock. Not what I visualised when I first heard of them, I was thinking of beautiful sweeping lawns on the sides of the lock. As you can see from the pic it was more a mixture of weeds with a basic steel framework to keep the boats in place. And, oh so slow to fill the last 3 feet!

As on the Thames, we came across several more of these pillboxes along the way. I haven't read any history of the canals during wartime yet, but they certainly had this canal covered with one on each side. Several of the locks were protected like this.

 
It's been double locks all the way which speeds up the process somewhat. Big locks and lots of water, coming very quickly if you're not careful!

We reached our destination around three o'clock however, we had no luck scoring a mooring from the limited number available around Aldermaston. We picked up water, with the tank well down after three loads of washing, and headed off out of Aldermaston, under the lift bridge and into the lock.

We cruised on for at least an hour, making one attempt to moor at a likely spot but with no luck, it was much too shallow. There were a few boats moored in the location below so we tried our luck and got close enough to the bank to call it a mooring. Despite a shaky start with an angry wasp Serafina was secure for the night in a pleasant little spot just before Bridge 29.

Day 2 didn't warrant me dragging the camera out. Once again it was pleasant cruising with much more of the scenery of day 1. We arrived in Newbury just after lunch, mooring up in the 14 day moorings, locking up the boats and heading back along the tow path a few hundred metres to the large Tesco we had just passed.

Just a quick note on moorings between Reading and Newbury. Without getting political, a few more moorings wouldn't hurt, they are currently few and far between.