18 locks, 12 people, 2 boats and 1 Super Awesome™ weekend

Super Awesome™ (adjective) The act of being better than super and better than awesome; the highest compliment one can pay to an event or person; popularised by Dave Gerhard. Eg - that canal boating weekend was super awesome.

And so it was, 12 of us had found our way to Rugby (the birthplace of rugby football for the record), some of us strangers, some friends, all with a common goal of taking Canal Boating to a new level. British weather being what it was meant we had a fair of rain, and the fact I was the only one on our boat with a rain jacket and it was raining during training I became the default pilot (or should that be captain?) for our boat, The Spirit Of Awesomeness (okay, so her real name was Harry but that didn't quite have the pizazz we were looking for).

After a relatively short session on how to operate and maintain the vessel they remarkably sent us on our way unaccompanied and let us fend for ourselves. Needless to say there was a bit of a learning curve.

From Canal Boating

It also didn't help that soon after setting off the rains came, and came, and came. We had to go through a series of three locks and it was absolutely pelting down, as the default captain I was left to stand outside in the middle of it all and get soaked to the core. To be fair, most of the others were running around opening and closing locks, but there were members of the team who considered such manual labour to be beneath them and remained inside sipping tea and reading about philosophy (I assume). But simonbills.com exists not to name and shame anyone, it's all about sharing the love, and over the course of the weekend there wasn't a single freeloader, everyone knew their role and played it well.



There are 3 ideal times to take good photos. Sun up, sun down, and right after a thunderstorm. The heavy rain soon gave way to clearer skies and we were blessed with the third type of ideal condition. As luck would have it the sun was reasonably low in the sky as well so there was this beautiful soft light, ideal for taking photos of people taking photos.



During our induction we asked whether we could climb on the roof of the boat and were told we could. After 3 days of not seeing a single other person on the roof of their boat I'm pretty sure they guy meant "You won't break the boat if you get on the roof, they're pretty sturdy" but what we heard was "You should totally spend loads of time on the roof, maybe even do some dancing up there as low bridges approach, and if you feel the need you can put an unstable chair up on that slippery roof and go your hardest."





Friday and Sunday were bad weather days, but Saturday was perfect. Glorious warm sunshine with brooding but non-threatening clouds to give it some atmosphere, the perfect opportunity to practice shooting into the sun and using lens flare to get cool effects. This is very much a hit and miss affair, but when it works I LOVE the results, this is probably my favourite shot of the weekend because it's a bit rough around the edges. It's not pin sharp from corner to corner, there's some motion blur on the hand, but the important bit, the eyes, are nice and sharp and are framed by a couple of the sun's rays (shot at a narrow aperture to get this star burst effect). It feels like the sun's coming down and wrapping itself Dave and his wine filled plastic cup (he lost glass privileges after 2 prior breakages).



Okay, so this blog is getting kind of long so I'll wrap it up with a final story. Our selected route took us through a tunnel, and not a short tunnel either, I think it was 1 mile or so in length which is pretty long for a narrow tunnel with no lights. We'd heard rumours it was haunted, so as a pre-emptive strike to scare off ghouls we put our ipod speakers on the roof and cranked Ghostbusters at full volume, you know, just to let them know we weren't to be taken lightly. This tunnel was DARK. There were no in-tunnel lights at all, so our only vision was via lighting from our boat. We had a big spot light on the front but in addition they recommend going down the boat, opening all the curtains and turning on all the lights to reflect light off the walls. Both these scenarios were customs made for taking cool photos, conditions were a little tricky and I had to shoot manual at f/2.8, but I love the results.





TO round things out I've put together a little slideshow, enjoy!