One of the challenges when you purchase a boat is that you have to get it to where you want it. Us buying Barnet has meant the my partner and I have spent what seems like every spare weekend this summer boating. In and of itself this is fantastic – however when week-ending a boat from up country down to London the logistics can quickly get challenging and more often than not it’s the trains not the canals which let you down. Despite spending more time on train platforms in the middle of nowhere than I’d normally care for we have a had a pretty good time of it. One of the happy occurrences of the boating schedule with Barnet was that I was able to host CRT Chief Executive Richard Parry and Janet Richardson from Towpath Talk for a lovely trip along the Milton Keynes pound.
Both Richard and Janet had a first experience of steering a big old boat like Barnet, both with great success. Sadly location and timing meant that I wasn’t able to utilise the extra crew for locking however we had a glorious morning of sunshine and even got in to the bank without grounding to moor up. Expect to see some photos in a forthcoming Towpath Talk. Hopefully the first of many column inches of press for Barnet under our stewardship.
Thanks also to Janet for the excellent photo above.