You wouldn't want this in your back tyre

We had a bit of time before the first locks today, so I tackled the puncture. It didn't take long to find. This must be the longest foreign object I've had in a tyre: a two-inch nail. No wonder the tyre deflated so rapidly. Two patches later - over the entry and exit holes - the repair seems to be holding up. It lasted throughout the Stockton flight, anyway.

At a Boaters' Christian Fellowship event last year a member was disposing of a number of boating bits and pieces. I came away with a Dunton Double aluminium windlass. I usually eschew ally windlasses owing to the difficulty of retrieving them if they get dropped in the cut, but the addition of some hose clips should give me at least a fighting chance. 

The Dunton Double is a cunning combination of a large eye and a small eye windlass: when using on a small spindle - the more common type - the head of the windlass goes right over the spindle until it engages with the small eye. On a large, square-ended spindle such as on the paddle gear on the locks of the Grand Union between Calcutt and Birmingham, just the first part of the head fits over the spindle. It worked really well on all of yesterday's and today's locks, but I shall probably revert to my iron single small eye windlass from tomorrow for the Braunston locks etc.

I was surprised to see another CRT man checking lock gates today. He didn't seem to know the person I saw yesterday.

Ah - the HS2 crossing just west of Welsh Road Lock. It's like a small town is created wherever the new railway goes.

This temporary bridge over the canal looks like a conveyor bridge.

It ends oddly in an uplift.

At quite a few of today's locks I saw that the chains which usually dangle down the lock sides had been pulled up and left on the coping stones. I asked CRT about this (there was a maintenance team about) and they said that people do it to avoid the chains scratching their boats. It shouldn't be done, though. The chains should be left dangling in the lock as hauling them up creates a trip hazard.

At Lock 6, near the top of the Stockton flight, we came across the first non-working paddle of the whole trip so far. Not bad going, considering we have done something like 90 locks, with each lock having usually four paddles.

The house at Wigram's Turn (Napton Junction) still has its strange clouds on the wall.

And now some very poor photos of lapwings.

We know they were lapwings as Jan's Birdnet app on her phone identified them as such from their calls.

They make a most unusual electronic gadget-type sound of bleeping and whistling.

Apparently lapwings are the same as peewits.

We saw and heard the lapwings where we tied up betweren Lower Shuckburgh and Flecknoe on the Grand Union/Oxford Canal.