After my awful experience with the spider, I went out for the evening to the canal in Avoncliff, just outside of Bath. John was keen to show Simon and me his boat he had been building/renovating for the last 50 years and was now living on.

We went for a relaxing ride down the canal on a lovely summers evening. We would have gone further down the canal towards Bathampton, but a boat decided to come loose from where it was moored and block the whole of the canal. Despite jumping aboard the adrift vessel like Somali pirates, in a bid to try and move it back to where it was once moored, we couldn’t, so turned around and headed back.

While aboard HMS Watkins, we dined like kings, using the very latest disposable barbecue technology to (partly) cook burgers, sausages and kebabs.

Once we had eaten our fair share of cow and pig, we moored up and enjoyed a few drinks, while getting pestered by a local cat. We also discovered a dead badger which had been festering in canal waters just a short distance from John’s boat. It stunk like… well, what you would expect a dead badger to smell like that had been lying in the hot summers sun all day.

Dead, smelly badger in canal

Being very brave, or stupid, John and Simon devised a lasso using just string and a Sainsbury’s bag to remove the dead animal from the waters. Having already eaten, we decided against putting it on the barbecue, so chucked it into nearby hedgerow… again, I was at a safe distance to prevent being splashed with dead badger juice.

Dead, smelly badger about to be cooked

A nice evening. I’m already looking forward to my next voyage, when hopefully we will get a bit closer to Bathampton and not encounter any more dead bodies.