Indian Summer - long may it last

The Indian Summer is still with us and we're still wearing T-shirts although it's not quite warm enough to dig the shorts out of their winter hiding place.

The Grove Lock pub still has some lovely hanging baskets outside.

I particularly liked the fancy brackets

 
Stopping for water above Slapton Lock showed just how poorly made these new fangled water stanchions really are. This one is held together with Gaffer Tape and both padlocks have been "removed" possibly to be used on one of the many "pikey" boats that are permanently moored round here.

We'd planned on staying for the weekend on the visitor moorings just above Slapton Lock, but the wide beam boat in front of us had a huge mastiff type dog that was a bloody nuisance. As we were mooring up it came bounding along pushing me and trying to grab the rope and it's owner looked really put out when I asked her to call her dog away. It then kept trying to get on board, much to Chico's disgust. It was allowed out unsupervised to do it's business so we had to be very careful where we trod and it's owners never took a lead with them when they walked it and seemed quite happy to let it run up to and jump up at walkers.  When they let it out to amuse itself again this morning I decided I'd had enough so we turned round and started heading back down the locks again.  We haven't gone very far, only cruising long enough to run a load of washing. The solar panels are still working really well so we didn't need to carry on running the engine after we'd moored up to charge the batteries.

Here's a little tip for you - whenever I run a wash load I always do an extra spin cycle after the main cycle has finished. This gets so much excess water out of the laundry that it dries much quicker. Last week I forgot and instead of a load taking 1 hour to dry in the dryer it took 2 hours.

The pound between Grove Lock and Church Lock was very low and we crawled along the bottom all the way. There was no obvious reason for the low level, the lock paddles were all shut and we didn't see any signs of a breach.

When we came back today the level had risen about 3 inches but we still had trouble finding somewhere deep enough to get in to the side to moor up.