the long thin narow boat

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Kate and I - and two dogs - have just spent a week on a narrow boat on the Brecon and Monmouth canal. The scenery was lovely as the canal runs high up above the River Usk through the Brecon Beacons. The boat was very long- 50 foot, with all mod cons, just a little on the narrow side. We just about managed to steer the thing through bridges and marinas, but the main trouble was that the canal is notoriously shallow (a fact that escaped us when we booked) and we spent a lot of time "punting" ourselves out of the mud. This also meant that it was difficult to park whenever you fancied, as you couldn't get near enough the bank to leap off; a gangplank was provided, but I never did work out how you could get across it if you were both on the boat and it was still moving. Probably by being 50 years younger, agile and fearless! It was much harder work than either of us envisaged, but we had a great time and it only rained once whilst we were "driving," for about half an hour

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Photos

squeezing over
to pass another boat

racing the traffic
on the "head of the valley" road

that pipe
actually knocked me off my seat as we came the other way. in fact, the seat nearly went in the canal too.

just as we had imagined
lunch on deck

there were 5 locks
luckily there were volunteers to help with that, so we didn't empty the canal by mistake.

Comments

[Robyn]

What a lovely holiday
it's something I have always wanted to do!

[Higblog]

boating
if only we'd known robyn, we needed more crew!