Well, the British do like to queue. And today it was Bella's turn to demonstrate her heritage. We pootled along nicely from Old Windsor lock where we had electrics and did a whole heap more of laundry (zoom into Bella's deck in the pic of her moored on the pontoon). It was a lovely mostly sunny day and we were mentally scheduled to enter the top of the River Wey Navigations a waterway managed 
by the National Trust. But...At Chertsey Lock, south west of central London just touching Surrey, the lock gates were not working. At first it was thought that the hydraulics had failed, but that was fine on testing. So some divers appeared and after their deep swim to the bottom of the gates, they found a large log which wedged the gate open. In the meantime, queues were forming upstream and downstream. By the time all was clear and we could move forward, we had quite a band of friends with six boats breasted alongside with us - we were boat two from the towpath in this shot, with Atlantis to our right and three small v hull cruisers outboard of them. We moved forward in three hits, two of the times with Rupert, Pete and John pulling the first-to-the-towpath narrowboats's lines so that the whole raft of six boats could move in one hit. This meant pulling on 65 tonnes of narrowboat steel and whatever the plassy cruisers (v hulls) weighed. What a hoot! We finally untied our raft for the finally decant into the lock.
The first-to-the-towpath narrowboat doesn't have a name yet, as it was only just collected by Rupert from Reading a few days ago. The proud owner of a Metrofloat double width narrowboat style (http://www.metrofloat.co.uk/), he was thrilled for the opportunity to give tours to all the other boaters who wanted a peek! It was touring one of those which made us decide that we could actually make a boat a home, but then we thought we'd try out a 'proper' narrow boat first. We wouldn't go to a Metrofloat now until we have to think about stopping somewhere for good because our bodies can't do this anymore. Then you can probably see us in one, moored up next to a patch of garden on the Kennet and Avon...
