ALONG THE WAY

Leaving Cosgrove on the offside the Teepee pictured below which i was told by a residential boater along this stretch is lived in by a single chap, evidently it`s the real thing, an artic tee pee, not just a copy and he even has a fire going inside the smoke exiting at the top just like the red indians you see in the cowboy films.

Coming up through the Soulbury 3 locks we encountered a long delay and upon walking ahead
it became clear what was wrong. Two boats were ahead of us one going through all 3 locks and the other wanted to wind (turn) and come back towards us. Now this is an official winding hole so he is not doing anything stupid but un-fortunately the pound was low on water and he went aground. If you look on the right of picture the normal waterline can be seen on the wall.
The solution was easy all that had to be done was let the water flow through the lock behind where i`m standing taking the pic and fill the pound but the other boat was still in the lock and owing to only one paddle working and gates leaking it was taking for ever to get the boat out of the lock so we could open the paddles at the other end to fill the pound, 35 mins delay but that`s boating folks.


One of the long term moorers along this stretch had gone to a lot of trouble making this tin man from scrap metal and below the Heron decided to pose as i cruised by, usually as you approach they fly off and land ahead of you only to take off again as you catch up when the next take off takes them over a field to land behind you.
The picture below is the Wyvern holiday boat dock at Leighton Buzzard and passing this way last year there were 23 boats moored 4 abreast leaving just enough room to cruise by. As you can see
just one boat is moored but on reflection I think it was school half term so the fleet was all out on hire.

Just recently i either watched something on TV or read in the paper about computers, well the jist of it was we are sitting at our PCs me typing this then you reading it and thinking not much power is being used so we are only making a tiny carbon footprint but what I didn`t think of was the servers - you know the big computers the internet links to- that are running to supply our net needs and the amount of power that`s used to cool them. The small rooms housing these servers are the size of football pitches with hundreds of them squeezed in with large air con units cooling the room. Anyway the interesting point of this story is a company is leasing large warehouse`s in Iceland, country not the shop, to house their servers and they reckon they will re-coup the cost by a dramatic reduction in cooling costs.
So here`s me sitting thinking how good i am living on board not causing to much of a problem to the world.............

Anyway below is a preview of the next blog