Preparations

We have been readying ourselves and the boat of late to once again partake in the Totally Thames Source to Sea Relay. Time has crept quickly upon us and there is less than a week to go before we journey up to Oxford for our leg of the event. We will be collecting the bottle of Thames source water at Sandford and bringing it down to Abingdon on Wednesday, before leaving it in the care of the lock keeper for the night. The bottle will carry on its journey downstream without us, but not before getting a Morris send off from Rob and the guys he dances with.

The boat is nearly ready to play her part in the relay. I have washed the windows and the majority of the steel work. House-dwellers do not seem to notice it so much, but on the water spiders are everywhere - and wherever they are, they poo. Spider poo. I was not familiar with spider poo until I lived on a boat. Now we even sing a little ditty about it (to the theme of the original Spider-Man cartoon):

Spider poo, spider poo,

It's the thing that the spiders do...

Okay, so it needs a little work (we even have little ditties about lighting the fire, but I suspect this just confirms that we are a little weird, especially as we have not tired of it in over ten years). But, spider poo is gross. This is an exterior bulkead:

It is supposed to be uniformly blue. All that discolouration is spider poo (Spider poo, spider poo...). I removed a pint of spiders (that is a legitimate measure for spiders) from the front of the boat yesterday and washed the steel down as best as I could. I also renewed the gaffer tape that stops the windows from leaking. It is not very elegant but until we have the time and means to refit the windows it will have to do - just do not look too closely at our relay photos.

Rob has also been busy making a top-box for the roof. The lid of which will be constructed using a couple of our solar panels. We have more solar panels than planned top-boxes, so he will make a rack for the other panels and have them up and running (famous last words) in time for our trip. They are not really necessary as the engine will generate enough power for our needs, but it is nice to have them all the same.

I also set myself a challenge. I was given a sewing machine as a graduation present and as I am new to the world of sewing I thought my very first project on this machine could be bunting for the relay.

I had grand plans of bedecking the entire boat with the stuff, but to be fair, after hours of sticking myself with pins (blood sacrifice, I presume) I am happy to announce that I have made enough to go around the stern rail. That is not very much at all, but I am proud of my little achievement. I will post photos of it from the relay. I never knew sewing needed so much concentration. It made my brain, and my machine, go fuzzy.

And whilst we were busying ourselves Lolly kept up her job of Chief Lookout, and she did it admirably.

Nothing is coming. I think we are safe.

It has been lovely, after all the work we have been doing on the boat, to sit on the roof in the evenings and watch the sun set. We have had some pretty displays of late: