Cruising Again...at long last.

It's been a while since our last serious trip. Last time our journey came to an abrupt end at Pewsey on the Kennet and Avon caused by a massive fallen tree completely blocking the canal. It had just happened the night before we got there and luckily no-one was passing when it happened. It was seriously large.
We heard later that it took 4 days to remove it before the canal was open again.

So here we are moored up outside The Barge Inn at Seend on the Kennet and Avon Canal. Yesterday we plucked up the courage...and strength to take on the mighty Caen Flight of locks. 29 in total.
Here is what you see before entering the top one.

It doesn't look terribly exciting at this point but....

The first lock dropped us very tightly under the road leaving Devizes as we head west.

Straight ahead are 16 locks. Once we started there is no stopping until all 16 were completed. Each lock has a side pound of water which allowed them to be built close together in a straight line down the steep slope. An amazing feat considering they were built in the 18th Century! In 1996 a new pumping station was added at the bottom of the fight to return the water to the top. It is capable of returning 32 million litres of water very day. Equivalent to one lock full every 11 minutes.

Here is the view from the bottom of the 16.

But we were not finished then. There are 29 and we had only done the 16, plus 7 before the flight. We still had 6 more before we could rest.

However we had paired up with Narrow Boat 'Camali' befroe starting the whole flight and Dave and Eileen along with their guest crew were very helpful. We did it in 5 hours, which is very reasonable.

Although it took most of the day, we had only travelled 2 miles, and we had dropped 237 feet in that distance.

We found the last mooring space at Sells Green and settled down to a beautiful sunset. But Sue missed it as she was so tired she was asleep by 8:45 and stayed that way for 12 hours.

We woke up to this:

Perfect.....cheers!