Rudder trouble

Hoping to stay dry we leapt into the boat and headed off, straight into the opposite bank! We limped to the next possible stopping area which looked like the swans were using it as a convenience. The rudder was pointing in the opposite direction to the steering pole. We were at the point of carrying the boat home when we tried holding the steering paddle straight and forcing the rudder round. It seemed to work and off we went for 1:48 covering 11.05 km

Lechlade with new boat, paddles and a rudder

We hit the water with great excitement and that was just because our new boat is so much lighter than our last, it was not so much of an expedition just getting to the river. We had been told that the boat was very stable so jumped in and found out that we did not share the definition of stability. We got about 30 yards and felt the rudder was not very straight, Will turned round to check it and we both fell in, swam to the side and looked forward to the remaining 1:59 of our training session. Although we were a little bit cold and damp we had a good session, 1:50 10.84km including swimming!

A new steed

We won! well that is what we were told by ebay. we have just picked up our new boat, and the exciting news is it has a rudder, we will have to see how much difficulty this adds to the process of paddling.

Out of the dark into the light and then into the deep

Our first serious training session, on the water by 06:30, thankfully the rain had cleared and been replaced by a light wind.We had two hours to use on the water so we went down to the one hour point at roughly the same speed as last time and turned at Kelmscott. On turning round we suddenly noticed the wind! It was much harder work up stream but the boat seemed to stay truer and we got some great periods of paddling in unison going before the inevitable breaking from the back to steer. As we came to the last lock on the way home we nudged the bank with the bow and the camera, complete with new waterproof housing and suction tripod fell in to the water and sank. We should probably have tied it on or at least attached a cork to it, another valuable lesson learnt.
We started to get a feel for locks under a bit of effort and cold, we were walking like dinosaurs when we got out of the boat, not dissimilar to the triathlon t2 from bike to run!