We had rain overnight and then waited for the strong winds to come. The forecast had been for gusts of up to 50mph today, but the morning started off quite calm with a wonderful bright blue sky that just got brighter as the day went on.

Yesterday we’d stocked up for a cooked breakfast so it would have been rude not to enjoy it, but all the time we wondered if maybe we should push off and get ourselves to Hazelford Lock.

Still wanting to top up with water we walked down to the lock to check out the position of the taps in the lock cut.  There are two taps we could use, both quite high up. Getting to the taps would mean either reversing into the cut or reversing back out as it didn’t look wide enough to wind Oleanna. With the proximity of the weir and the strong winds,we’d noticed as soon as our heads had got above the level of the cut, reversing was not going to be a good idea. A few years ago in flood conditions a narrowboat was swept over the weir here and a lady got thrown overboard, so we are not going to put ourselves at risk, the water can wait.

Our thoughts of moving on were also put to one side, not a day to be battling with the wind especially when the next lock is GUNTHORPE! The world needs to be a calm calm place when we go through there. Instead we decided to move to the low wall mooring all of 120ft away. Here we’d let Tilly out and stop her from being mardy with us. The low wall was even more sheltered the wind blustering through the trees above leaving, us alone below.

Tilly enjoyed her time outside. I just couldn’t make up my mind though. Was this a wall ? Was this a hill? Where were my friends? A pounce on a 50 degree angle takes some force from the back legs, calculations were done and spring factors worked out, but still no friends. Up above on the towpath the wind blew my bottom (I hate this!) then lots of people went by on bicycles and some with woofers. This outside was most certainly not a contender for a Mrs Tilly stamp, it’s far far too BLOWY!

During the afternoon and evening Mick has been trying to fathom out what is happening with blogger and our photos. Several people including Tom have come up with work arounds for using Open Live Writer and Blogger, but they still don’t want to work. At the moment photos only seem to show if I do the whole post in blogger. There is no logic to what is happening. Looking back at posts prior to the problems all my photos have gone, right back to when we handed Lillian over to her new owners. Really not happy!

We are strongly considering moving the blog over to WordPress, NB Lillyanne’s blog is there. It means we’d loose the rolling blog role on the side, but at least my photos would be seen! This of course will take a little while to set up and we’ll let you know if and when it will move.