On the Thames at last

We were up early as we had to get through the tidal lock before we got to the main gateway to the Thames. We had a appointment at 8.00am and we had to wait half a hour before the lock keeper turned up. This had put us behind and meant the tide was going out. The weather was good but there was a strong wind which was forecast to get even stronger. So not only were we going up stream, with the tide now going out we had the wind against us. We turned right onto the Thames and Derwent6 just stopped, we weren't going nowhere. We upped the revs to 2000rpm (we had never been there before) and we slowly crept forward. We were pleased to have the life jackets on as we felt we were going to be blown off the stern! Once we got going it was just fantastic...... We went past Kew gardens, Richmond and Twickenham before getting to Teddington lock. We pulled up on the lock moorings and found out what we had to do before entering this massive lock. We got off and held the bow and stern as the gates opened to let the water in.

We felt we needed a breather after all that adventure so we moored up on the non tidal section and walked back to the lock keeper to buy our licence. We had a 15 day licence which set us back £128.00 (no food for a week then) We had some lunch and were going to set off again but the wind had got even worse. Good job we left when we did!!!!

So that was it for the day. They said the wind would drop in the afternoon, but it didn't, so we decided to stay put. We had a look around and found two good pubs which had some live music on in the evening. We could hear it all from the cratch on Derwent6, so we got out the beers and the cheese and biscuits watching all the trip boats too-ing and fro-ing past us all night.