Brentford to the Thames

Being keen, we were up early and went down through the gauging locks to see if we could get out onto the Thames at 8:00am, but the lockeeper didn;t recommend it. So we returned to the U-Boat pen and amused ourselves by reading the paper and putting the name on the side of Iris.


This was actually quite easy, I got the name made up from SAC graphics (www.sacgraphics.com) who were very helpful and sent me a couple of examples in differing fonts to choose from. I decided to keep things nice and clean, so no flourishes, roses, castles or any of that stuff. The finished result looks really good. Thats Mat 'Thousand yard stare' Sleightholme at the helm.


Finally it was time to venture out onto the Thames, so it was back through the gauging locks at Brentford. These are electrically operated, with about 12-14 buttons for individual functions. I was hoping that there was just a big 'get my boat through' button, but I managed to figure it out.














I decided to take one last picture of us on the Grand Union, by this time I was begining to sense a level of discontentment amongst the crew.....