I've had a word at work and am only working 4 day weeks from now on. Not too sure if I'm invading Penny's space (she doesn't work Friday's) but there we go!
We do some necessary work at home (and at Tesco's!) on Friday morning and eventually head off to Dreadnought at about 1.00 It's a truly beautiful day.
We load up our (ever decreasing amount of) gear and (after a bit of lunch) set about stowing and doing a few jobs - a bit cleaning, hanging some more fenders and other such stuff.
A few pictures from this evening:
Saturday soon dawns, exactly as forecast, not a cloud in sight! So, after a leisurely breakfast we head for Henley, nice and slow, enjoying the sunshine. We trundle along with nothing particularly eventful to report and before we know it we are dropping through Marsh Lock and we are in Henley. We decide to go through the bridge and run down the regatta course before turning back to find a mooring. This we do, spotting Happy Chance moored on the offside, so after turning beyond the island (this boat is ever so easy to turn) we come back upstream and moor a couple of boats behind, intending to say hello. (Happy Chance was the boat that inspired us to have a Piper 49M 2 Cabin)
Steve arrives pretty promptly to collect our mooring fee, I've never moored here before, but I really like it. We head off into Henley for a wander about, and head along the towpath towards Marsh to find Alan and Marianne on Dea Latis, well we find Alan and sit in the sun drinking his beer, it's a great life!! Alan and I have a bit of a chat about AIS, he's trying to get his to work, and I'm trying to understand how mine works!! Marianne turns up after a bit of shopping and we set off back to Henley. We buy a few bits, can't really remember what, but must be important and head back to the boat. Claire and Jeremy are now 'in' so we say hello and they come back with us to have a look at our interpretation of a 49M, drink wine and watch the Grand National (they backed quite a few horses between them)(none of them did anything!!)
Here we are in Henley:
After a leisurely breakfast the following morning we went for a bit of a walk, saw some parakeets, heard a woodpecker, sat in the sun on the back deck drinking coffee, talking to passers by, and eventually, despite some reluctance, decided to set off back to Caversham. We trundled up towards Marsh, and my AIS alarm goes off (after yesterdays chat with Alan I'd read the instructions and messed around with the settings) and the chartplotter tells me that Dea Latis is at Marsh Lock! We arrive (2nd boat behind Alan) and I walk up to tell him the good news. He comes back with me to have a look and asks me what I did, I tell him how I set it up and off he goes, next thing I know, he can see us too!! Success!
We cruise slowly back upstream, passing Alan & Marianne who stopped for lunch near Shiplake. Alan took some photo's and film of us passing. Soon enough we are back at Dreadnought, I did the reversing in manoeuvre again, seems easier to get into the pontoon this way. We clean and tidy a bit and back to the real world - again.
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