Making up for lost time

Typical Nene guillotine lock gate - Weston Flavell

Its not a lake, its a solar farm

Beautiful Nene scenary

Wow! 7.5 hours wonderful cruising in perfect weather - sunny but not too hot and no wind.  We intended to make up for the past 3 days of lethargy and so set off at 8:15.  After going through the first lock at Weston Flavell we met up with "Padworth", a single handed boat, with whom we shared most of the subsequent locks.  On two separate occasions we saw grass snakes swimming across the river - in all our 9 years on Densie we had only ever previously seen one.   Throughout the whole journey we were surrounded by clouds of damsel flies and many of the larger dragon flies.  There were many terns flying up the river and overhead I saw a red kite
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After making good progress we stopped for.an hour at Wellingborough for a quick shop and to fill up with water.  Then on the move again, this time on our own as Padworth had left earlier.  The river is low due to lack of rain and there is a lot of weed around despite the efforts of a weed cutting boat we passed.  At one lock I had to open up the weed hatch to clear a couple of handfuls of blanket weed from around the propshaft but apart from that we had no problems.

We finally moored up at Irthlingborough at 5pm after 14.5 miles and 13 locks.  The celebratory glass of cider tasted wonderful.