...Boogie Nights: if plastic bags were women?

having moved yet again from my favourite spot in Limehouse Basin we cruised up the Regents canal ( not the limehouse cut as we would later regret)

Now, anyone who's has been around London may, or may not have experienced this lovely bit of canal. It has taken me nearly a week to find the words to describe it eloquently.

Basically it's a shit hole and reinforces everything I abhor about canals.

we cruised quickly through the first lock (which of course had to be turned around as they are never facing the your way- thats the law of the sod)
no sooner were we through that lock and the next lock quickly appeared, again the wrong way round but that's ok, we were expecting that.

So, the Man (who is gradually getting less and less grumpy these days as the thoughts of selling the boat get more and more imminent and the dream of sailing the world get closer) was in fact on particularly good form and we were working well as a team and everything was going tooooo well.

We exited the second lock, swung by a rubbish barge, it wasn't rubbish, it was quite good, very convenient as it is a great place to chuck the rubbish...
fnar, so, rounded the first corner and suddenly we are going nowhere.
The realisation quickly dawned on us that the pound was badly drained and we were on the bottom, literally ditch crawling.
It's a shite state of affairs when this happens because not only is there very little water, the concentration of plastic bags per litre of rancid canal water increases 100fold.

We decided to head to the side and beach ourselves so we could have a good look in the weed hatch.
what we found was a prop completely engulfed in plastic.
You can imagine by now Ive been standing on the side a few times with a limp wet rope, my hood pulled up around my ears to keep out the freezing wind and a charming view of a pair of legs pointing away from the weed hatch.
It's at times like this I kill the time by entertaining myself with fantasies.

....As the french swearing faded to the back of my consciousness my mind was swimming around a blue lagoon, with turquoise warm waters, surrounded by ladies clad only in shiny plastic bikinis, I imagined their cheeky smiling faces laughing and all shiny from playing in the water, then as one cast away her restrictive plastic swimwear, so did the others and the plastic bikinis took on a life of their own, floating across the surface of the crystal clear water they take form, fill out and become a whole new set of lovely ladies, swimming about and causing mischief.....

back in reality the prop was cleared and we pushed the boat away from the sandbank at the side and continued at a snails pace on towards the next lock. After less than 50meters we were virtually motionless again and so back to the side for further weed hatch foraging and limp wet rope holding...
It seemed pointless trying to drive the boat the final quarter mile to the next lock so I set about bow hauling while the next load of bikinis were being liberated from the prop and rudder. The rudder yielded an impressive haul too, although I never did see a woman with breasts quite so big before.