Holiday - photo heavy

Well, in fact as far as holidays go, it's photo-light due to various circumstances, but for a blog post it's photo-heavy as it doesn't seem worth splitting into two. Back in March we decided that it was highly unlikely that we would be able to get to France on the dates we had booked the ferry for, so we decided that a Shannon cruise would be the safest holiday bet for this summer. It's not a cheap option - it probably cost about the same for a week as three weeks camping in France all told, but it was pretty Covid-proof unless we had another major lockdown and couldn't leave our county, and I went for the only company that offered a full refund rather than credit if you had to cancel for Covid-related reasons. It's twenty-five years since we last did this, but not a lot has changed on the river. Navigation is easy - going upstream, you keep red markers and buoys on the left, green on the right, and the reverse coming downstream. Not a lot of photos because of being on the go (although in fact we only logged just under 25 engine miles over the week, I still haven't figured out a mileage), and because of the highly contrasty conditions with water, reflections and wide-open skies. We were blessed with pretty good weather on the whole, and a wonderful downpour when we tied up for one night in a small town and a group of teens were playing very loud rap on the quayside.

Our first night was spent in Cootehall, we were the only boat there. As we were late leaving the cruiser base that afternoon, this was as far as we could come before the locks were open again the next morning. 
 

I don't think I've ever seen so many cormorants in one place before - on a very rocky strip in the middle of a lake. 

An old folly, in Lough Key, where we spent our first full day and second night. C rowed around several of the islands in our little dinghy. 

The castle is in fact just a folly, although the island had been previously occupied. 

This tall viewing tower dates from the seventies. Despite my poor head for heights, I managed to make it to the top, and enjoyed the views. 

I don't know how many swans and cygnets we saw during the course of the week - hundreds....

A common sight on many of the navigation markers - gulls and cormorants finding a handy perch. 

A bonus when we were unable to moor where we had planned one evening, and had to go further downriver to the next town. 

Carnadoe - we spent two nights here - it was lovely and peaceful, so after spending a day going down the two lakes beyond it, we were quite happy to moor up early and spend a second night there. 

On Kilglass Lough and Grange Lough we saw more crested grebes than we have seen for years. There were some youngsters too, more stripy looking. We even saw two Little Grebes, which I haven't seen for many years.  When we were tied up for our coffee break on Grange Lough, C was thrilled to see a kingfisher. 

I can't remember if this was our second evening in Carnadoe, or in the morning before we pulled out. Very peaceful just sitting there listening to the cows munching away, and the birds singing.

We covered parts of counties Leitrim, Longford and Roscommon. In some places the county boundary runs down the river, so a town might be in Longford on one side of the river and Roscommon the other side. We self-catered, apart from the very last day, No photos of any of the locks, because with only two of us, we were always both busy holding ropes. I don't remember that any of them had red/green traffic lights on the approaches when we did this before - it was certainly helpful to see that as one approached. Almost all of the ones we went through now seemed to be automated, but we took a side trip down the Camlin River, as our boat was small enough to do so, and the lock keeper at the end of it where we rejoined the Shannon was just using old-fashioned manpower to push the gates open and closed. I imagine it gets a lot less traffic than the locks on the main river - on our way upstream at Albert Lock, we had to wait for 4 boats to come through before we could go up, and there were another 9 queued up waiting to come down. The lock is only large enough to hold 4 at a time, so it would have been a bit of a wait for some of those. I was glad the upstream traffic wasn't so busy.