Waterlily comes home - not quite

So Waterlily was ours - see the Whilton post as this is the next stage in the story.

We dropped a car off at Fradley earlier in the week and set off on Friday 20th July and it was raining and it just kept raining. We stopped for Fuel on route and when we left the petrol station the road was actually flooded - in hindsight we only just made it through that stretch of flood water - the water was actually coming up from the grates !

The country - especially the West Midlands was getting a real downpour - we were lucky, some suffered significant problems

What really peed me off about Whilton was the lack of ceremony when we collected the keys. They just handed the folder of supporting documents got my signature and handed me the keys and told me where Waterlily was . By any ones standards the amount I paid was a lot - certainly garages passing new cars to new owners do it with a bit more flair. A bottle of wine and a card or flowers would have been nice - even to be escorted to the boat and best wishes given would have been better. Hey ho, no problem as we had Waterlily.

We loaded her in the wet, checked the diesel (full) and turned on what systems we could find - water, gas electric etc.

I reversed her out of her temp berth and got her onto the main line perfectly, a fine start to our ownership of her.

The water was flooding over the top gates of the locks and there was water everywhere - quite dangerous in fact. It was so bad we stopped just below the Buckby top lock and retired to the New Inn for food.

Saturday was better with no rain - just rumours of a collapse of Brauton Tunnel - our way home to Fradley I scouted the moorings above the top lock and found one right at the end by the BW base. So we moved up and did some checking of the situation. it turned out that the tunnel was OK but there was a significant mud slide on the Braunston end and it would not be until the start of the next week before engineers could even assess the damage.

we did consider the leicester ring option but the Soar was up as was the Trent - both part of this route home.

We were limited by time so a reluctant decision was taken to leave waterlily and reverse the planning - frustrating, but all0wed us to plan a quick return. We wanted our boat on our mooring !

Nev