We relinquished our sunny meadow mooring at Daingean & headed back towards Lowtown again for pumpout. Amusingly the journey that had taken us over a month took us just 7 hours in 3 hops on the return.
On our way to Lowtown we saw that several of the boats from Sallins who had gone down the Barrow had turned round due to a breach & were headed back up. They planned to head back the way we’ve come & then out on the Shannon so we asked if we could tag along & they kindly said we could.
So after pumpout & another boater kindly getting us a couple of cans of diesel topup we returned to our old favourite Ticknevin lock. We started with 3 boats then became 4 then became 6!
Whilst moored there one of the heritage boats came past & mum got a couple of good photos of it.
John Weaving was a river nomad who originally lived on “The Peter Farrell”. He spent most of his life travelling up and down the Shannon just fixing stuff. Here’s a picture of John and some friends back in the day…
There was a painting used in the movie was created by Goodfellas co-writer Nicholas Pileggi’s mother based on a 1978 photograph in National Geographic magazine of ‘river nomad’ and former banker John Weaving and his dogs Brocky and Twiggy on the Shannon.
John was a former banker who had lived out his retirement on the river Shannon and was quite a well-known figure in the area. In fact, the two dogs often accompanied him on his journeys up and down the river. There’s even a memorial bust of John Weaving near Terryglass Harbour in Tipperary that’s still there to this day so when we get there we’ll chcek that out. Sadly, John didn’t live to see himself immortalised in film as he passed away in 1987 just before the film’s release.
The weather had taken a turn for the worse whilst we were at Ticknevin so we hunkered down for the day but we managed to brave the cold for a night round the campfire. Well mum did we were snoozing on the settee
During the campfire we very excitingly had a radio dedication for Cosmo & Daquiri played on Dublin radio station Today FM. One of our little gang of boaters Claire is the DJ for the Saturday night show.
https://www.todayfm.com/shows/claire-becks-saturday-soundsystem-913345
Sunday dawned a bit nicer but we heard that The Peter Farrell was grounded beyond Edenderry due to low water levels so we decided to brave the weed & cruise into Edenderry Harbour. So we set off in a six boat convoy.
One of the penalties of having such beautiful clear water here & the recent hot weather means the sunlight gets through the water & the weeds flourish. However we just had one midway foray down the weedhatch & then mum cleared it once we were moored up. At least the weeds are easy enough to pull off the prop. The harbour looked quite different to when we were locked down there with all the little white flowers blooming on the weed.
We were first to moor up & one by one the other boats arrived. There was a lots of shuffling & poling as its tight turning in the harbour not helped by fouled props of course.
So nice not to be billy no mates here in Edenderry this time!
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