Taken on 6 tonnes of coal.

Friday 20th March.

Nether Heyford to Bugbrooke Downs near Banbury Lane Bridge 43, 2.8 miles.

Before bedtime I set our alarm clock to go off at 6am, so that we would be up nice and early, as we were due to begin taking on coal at 7.30am. Something however told my body clock to go off at 1am; there I was wide awake dead on 1am grrr. I could not believe it when I looked at the clock. I then spent ages trying to go back to sleep, by the time I reckon I got off; our alarm was beeping at us to wake up. Marmite saw it as her opportunity to jump on the band wagon, by jumping on Keith and meowing in his face, just in case we had not heard the alarm clock. Bleary eyed I crawled out of bed and got dressed. We rolled the bed up into the bed’ole and shut the cupboard door. It was then time for breakfast and Paddy’s walk. Both he and Marmite even had their breakfast early, so they will be screaming for their dinner later on as their tummies will be totally empty.
At 7.30am John opened up the coal yard, and filled us up with diesel first. Hadar swallowed 406 litres, which was darn good because we last filled up in November whilst in Stone. With the diesel done it was then time to load the empty hold. Before dinner last night we had rolled the sheeting up on the hold so it would be already to load coal into. In all it took us 1¾ hours to load 6 tonnes of coal into Hadar’s hold. That is 2 tonnes of Taybrite, 2 tonnes of Cosycoke and 2 tonnes of House Coal; all in all we have almost 7 tonnes of coal onboard as we had 37 bags of coal left over from our last intake. Keith and I took it in turns on the bank and in the hold, each doing a stint at stacking. We have developed a very good system, so it does not take us long to hand load coal these days. Once the hold was all sorted out, I had to go and pay for the coal, whilst Keith paid for the diesel and a new bottle of gas. We spent sometime chatting to both John and Richard, meaning we did not leave the yard until 10.50am. Our aim was to find somewhere to moor for the weekend, which ended up being near Banbury Lane Bridge. We are over looking the railway and fields with horses in. The sun is shining and all is right with the world in our eyes.