Blog - Page 4 of 6 - Beau Romer

18 August 202118 August 2021

Down Down, Deeper and Down

It’s been quite a week.

Our first night’s mooring was in Elland (as in Elland Road, Leeds United’s home ground). I’m sorry to say we found it a sad little town, all hairdressers and takeaways, and boasting a church with the most melancholy cemetary ever. So many of the gravestones are from the mid 1800s, but they’re all flat in the grass and most have become completely overgrown. In a few years there will be no indication the past residents of Elland were laid to rest there. Elland used to have an old fashioned sweet shop called Dobsons. It closed down last year, only leaving a factory temptingly perfuming the air with the smell of boiled sugar. To cap it all, the most assertive swan ever patrols the water outside the visitor mooring demanding food. As I was trying to put the covers up at the time and wasn’t obliging, he was pecking my boot in disgust. Don’t think we’ll stop there again.

The moorings at Elland, complete with belligerent swan

At Salterhebble we came across our first ever guillotine lock; a sinister-looking bit of kit. It’s electronically operated and moves at the speed of a wounded snail, which somehow makes it look even more malevolent. See the ladder and gantry half way up the gate support? That’s the footbridge across the lock. I’m glad it’s Martyn’s job to do the locks, mine to stay on the boat. Oh, and he managed to bonk himself on the head with the handspike there too. The fun never stops.

We took a little detour up the Salterhebble Arm, lured by the siren call of a McDonalds milkshake. The arm used to go to Halifax, but now terminates at an underpass under the very busy A629.

For a few days we moored in Sowerby Bridge at the junction of the Calder and Hebble and the Rochdale Canal. It’s a nice town with everything we need, but I did wonder why the CRT have concreted over the mooring rings on the visitor moorings and tarmaced the towpath so you can’t hammer in a pin. It doesn’t seem very boater-friendly.

While we were in Sowerby Bridge, we had a day off – or rather a busman’s holiday. On Sunday morning we were collected from the boat and driven to Marsden on the Huddersfield Narrow Canal. We’d volunteered to help our friends Paul and Anthony move their boat Morning Star down some of the 43 locks to Huddersfield. We had a fabulous day, it was lovely to have a good catch up. They kept us fed and watered and we enjoyed a curry and rather a lot of wine before Paul took us home again (and it was past midnight!) If you don’t know about Paul and Anthony’s YouTube channel Narrowboat Life Unlocked, check it out and enjoy.

Oh look, another Bickerstaffe – the gorgeous Morning Star

After that we left Sowerby Bridge for Hebden Bridge. There was just one obstacle in our way; Tuel Lane Lock, the deepest in the country with a rise of 19’8.5” or 6 metres. I really wasn’t looking forward to it, but as it turns out the lock keepers made the whole thing an absolute breeze. We had a rope around a cable at the stern but in all honesty we didn’t need it. Even though the water roiled and boiled as it flooded in, we hardly moved on the boat.

Add on another 4 metres, and you have the height of an Olympic diving board

We’ve come as far as we can go in this direction now. We’re outside the Stubbing Wharf pub in Hebden Bridge. We’d rather like to go a little further over the Pennines on the Rochdale, but we can’t. Lock 13 is dewatered and undergoing repair, so now we have to turn around and go back the way we came.

10 August 202110 August 2021

Onward, then, ye people

I don’t often get this close to what we call “The Daily Heron”

Guess what? Nothing bad has happened to us this week – fingers crossed. In fact, we had a bit of good luck. The Calder and Hebble Navigation has some rather unusual lock paddle gear. You stick a piece of slightly shaped 3×2″ hardwood into a ratchet and use it as a lever to raise the paddles. The piece of wood is called a Calder and Hebble Handspike, and we didn’t have one. We’d been trying to get one since Leeds, but with no luck, and we really didn’t fancy lurking helplessly on lock landings waiting for another boat to come along and take pity on us. That would have made us very unpopular indeed.

Martyn playing with his new toy, sorry, handspike

The Canal and River Trust have a large workshop at Stanley Ferry. It’s one of the places where they make replacement lock gates. They also make handspikes. Martyn sauntered down to the workshop to see if they sold them, and they just gave him one. I don’t imagine we’ll travel the Calder and Hebble again, so when we find another boat in a similar predicament, we’ll pass it on. Pay it Forward and all that. As an aside, the locks on this navigation are fierce. It doesn’t seem to matter how Martyn opens the paddles; which side first; or whether I have a line looped around a bollard. Several times I’ve met the opposite lock wall at a speed faster than I would like, and once lost the rope completely. I’m sure the boater behind me, well out of the turbulence and surge, was highly amused by my antics.

If you ask me, not all canalside graffiti is ugly

After Stanley Ferry we did a short hop to Wakefield, really just for shopping. The Hepworth is there, but I just wasn’t feeling arty that day; far more interested in dodging the torrential rain.

We moored in Horbury Bridge, and this is its claim to fame.

Also in Horbury Bridge is the most awkward waterpoint. It’s just the other side of this bridge, which nose under very cautiously because it looks like you’re heading into a residential basin, even though the facilities are for everyone. Can you also see in the photo there’s a pair of redundant lock gates? I assume they once opened out onto the River Calder.

The guy that moors by the water point described himself as “the troll under the bridge”

Tonight we find ourselves at Cooper Bridge Junction. If we turned left we’d head towards Huddersfield. But we aren’t going that way. We continue straight ahead in the direction of Brighouse and Rastrick. Yes, we’re in Brass Band Country.

5 August 20215 August 2021

Aires and Graces

It wouldn’t be one of my blogs if I didn’t start with the latest mishap. Mooring up in Leeds in the rain (after bossing a rather tricky manoeuvre where I turned the boat 90 degrees and reversed into a berth behind another boat and between a pontoon and the wharfside), I dropped my phone in the water. There was much wailing, and of course, it was all Martyn’s fault because if he’d been there to catch my rope, it wouldn’t have happened. I love that he was helping another boat through the lock, but I couldn’t see him, he wasn’t answering his phone (it was on the boat) or the walkie talkie (the battery was flat), and so I panicked. In my imagination he might be floating in the said lock. In haste I didn’t zip my pocket up when I put the phone away and – splash!

Cruising under Leeds Bridge. The owls on the crest are the emblem of the city, it’s motto Pro Rege et Lege (For king and law)

At least we were in Leeds, which is lovely, a joy and an unexpected delight. And Leeds has an Apple store, so even though we could have done without the cost, I was sorted quickly with a new phone.

The Royal Armouries is full of guns and swords, most of which leave me cold, but seeing the Walther PPK made this Bond fan very happy

Somehow I thought Leeds was going to be dour, grim and gritty, but not a bit of it. We moored in Leeds Basin squeezed in between the Candle building, the Hilton Doubletree and the railway arches and there we stayed while we explored the city for a few days.

A selection of my impressions of Leeds. Martyn’s standing in front of an aerial photo of Chesil Beach!

Leeds has some beautiful architecture, good shopping and a nice atmosphere. We enjoyed an outdoor photography exhibition, the Leeds Museum and the Royal Armouries. Living on a boat with limited space, we didn’t really take advantage of the shops. I told Martyn I’d buy him a Leeds United mug, but for some inexplicable reason he repeatedly declined! It was nice to see the city centre appears to be thriving post-Covid, with very few closed and empty shops.

Some of the buildings I snapped, including the Town Hall, Civic Centre, Old Post Office, Kirkgate Market and the Corn Exchange

One of my favourite sites was St Paul’s House. We found it by accident. A local gent eating his lunch outside the very grand Victorian Town Hall (which sports picnic tables and astroturf) told us about it. It was built as a warehouse and cloth cutting works, and it’s very ornate. If you want to read more about this magnificent building, there’s a really interesting blog about it here.

Rather reluctantly, we left on Tuesday. We’d met a nice couple, Michael and John, on nb Iron Butterfly, moored next to us in the basin (they lent us a net to fish for the lost phone) and arranged to share the locks on the River Aire with them. When we got on the River it was another unexpected delight. It’s pretty, wide, and all the locks are automatic, so operating them is only a matter of pressing a few buttons – no hard manual labour. Because the Aire and Calder is also a navigation that takes much larger vessels than us, they are also massive, and most of them have lock keepers, so no one even has to get off the boat. Sadly the Aire and Calder is all too short. We cruised most of it in two days, arriving at Stanley Ferry in the rain and drenched again, but all good things must, I suppose, come to an end.

About to cruise under a dismantled railway, with Stephenson’s Bridge in the background

28 July 202128 July 2021

Friends and Misdemeanours

Trev and Martyn, putting the world to rights and doing the Can-Can sitting down

Since my last post, we’ve been to Skipton twice and spent rather a lot of time there. It won’t be the last time. We’re constantly reviewing what I loosely call our cruising plans. It’s likely we’ll turn around after Leeds and retrace our steps rather than carry on down the Huddersfield Narrow Canal. I’ve heard it referred to as the “Huddersfield Shallow” and with all the trials of this summer, we don’t need that sort of angst. We’ve never planned on covering every inch of the network for the sake of it.

The first time we cruised through Skipton with Trev and Jen, turned around and went back to our favourite mooring in Gargrave and towpath barbecues. The night England played Italy in the Euro 2020 final, all fired up watching the TV on Life of Riley, someone noticed a train on the viaduct. It was the Flying Scotsman, thundering along with a full head of steam and pulling a string of empty carriages. It was a magnificent sight, and none of us was fast enough to grab a camera.

Bye Bye to Trev, Jen and Ralf, until next time.

The next day we had visitors, Mary and Ewan our next-door neighbours from Wareham. We took them to Skipton on the boat, it was the first of the recent really hot days and we worked them hard. It was lovely to see them and catch up.

While we were in Skipton, apart from enjoying pork pies from two of the award-winning butchers there, we also caught up with Mike and Christine who we hadn’t seen since we met them on the River Weaver last year. We drank far too much red wine and in the evenings, with all the hatches open because of the fearsome heat (we got to 32C on the boat quite a bit), we played some very competitive games of dominoes and crib!

I thought we deserved a further treat, so one day we set off on the very swish Staycation Express from Skipton via Settle to Carlisle. It’s such a famous run and was a lovely day out.

The obligatory shot of Beau Romer looking fabulous

Back on the route Eastwards, we passed a canalside memorial to seven Polish Airmen who were killed when their Wellington Bomber crashed on a training flight in 1943. It’s a sad story, one of them had been married for only 3 weeks and it was his bride, years later, who unveiled the memorial.

Polish Airmen memorial in a very peaceful spot

On Friday evening we were moored up in the little village of Kildwick. There’s a church on one side of the canal that strikes the quarter hours all through the day and night, and it’s cemetery over Parsons Bridge on the other side. We were having Friday night drinks with our friends from Wareham on Zoom when we noticed a hire boat weaving a very erratic path towards us. I could see exactly what was going to happen before it did. Crash! Yes, they drove right into the side of Beau Romer, before ending up in the bushes on the other side of the canal. Nothing to do about it, no point in shouting at them.

Dear Snaygill Boats, would you like your green paint back?

We stopped in Keighley to have another rendezvous with Mary, this time bearing a cucumber from her garden at home.

We came down the Bingley Five Rise with a lovely family on holiday. They had twin 16-year-old sons, and the lock keepers put them to work!

Bingley, home of locks, chimneys and thermal underwear

I was really looking forward to Saltaire, Sir Titus Salt’s model village. Oh happy memories of studying it, and similar for my housing qualifications! We had plans to visit the gallery to look at the large collection of David Hockney paintings. No-one told us the whole place is closed on Monday and Tuesday. Something for the return trip, and we did have the pleasure of meeting Mary’s friend Barbara who tracked us down.

Saltaire, extremely attractive if you like everything “just so”

Yesterday we had a scary incident. We were coming through the Dobson Locks Staircase at Apperley Bridge. In a staircase the bottom gates of one lock are also the top gates of the next, and water from one lock fills the lock below They always cause me a bit of a headache working out how to set them. We were going down and it was all fine until I was in the bottom chamber and had to reverse the boat so Martyn could open the lock gate and I could get out. The lock gate was leaking badly and water was cascading over my head like a tidal wave. It was more than the channels around our engine bay could cope with. Consequently, the engine bay was flooding, I was getting a cold shower, there was a warning buzzer sounding and I honestly, for a second or two, thought the boat was going to sink and I was going to drown.

Not the lock that nearly got me, but leaky enough

When I finally managed to get free of the torrent and moor up I was straight off for a shower – hot this time – and Martyn was mopping out the engine bay to get rid of the water the bilge pump didn’t reach. Lesson learned; we’re going to keep the pram hood up in future going down staircase locks!

7 July 202128 July 2021

Round and Round We Go

Faster chaps, unless you want a shower when he shakes!

The pace of travel has slowed down a little, just as it should. We aren’t in a hurry. From Salterforth (not Salterford!) and a fine dinner at The Anchor, we made our way through Barnoldswick, Greenberfield and East Marton to the section of the canal we know as the Curly Wurlies.

Double Arched Bridge at East Marton. The bottom arch was a packhorse bridge, they added the second to carry the A59.

The Curly Wurlies mess with your head. The canal meanders backwards and forwards in a serpentine manner following the lie of the land. You literally don’t know whether you’re coming or going. One minute the Langber TV mast is ahead of you on the left, then it’s on the right. It all makes you rather dazed and confused.

We’re all going in the same direction, I think …

We stayed in the beautiful countryside at Trenet Laithe for two nights, and I managed my first decent walk since falling over and all the resulting drama. There are a lot of sheep in the fields along the Pennine Way – at least where we were. I’ve often wondered why lamb is so expensive when there seems to be so much of the stuff on the hoof? There was a great TV signal on our mooring for the England v. Ukraine football match. As it finished the most terrific storm started. Poor Ralf nearly jumped out of his skin on the towpath because of an enormous thunderclap right overhead. We later found out it had taken out all the electrics in East Marton.

I’d say hurry up Martyn, but the most important thing on a narrowboat is to be slow and steady.

Carrying on we descended the Bank Newton locks, so picturesque. I’d heard some horror stories about bricks jutting out of the wall ready to catch unwary boaters, we but didn’t see any and got down them just fine. They are a bit leaky though.

This is what you call a piddler. And it wasn’t the only shower I got that day!

On to Gargrave, where we are now. What a pretty village. Some nice new houses are being built on the banks of the canal, with a nice price tag to boot. Over £500,00 for a semi? I don’t think so!

Stepping Stones crossing the River Aire at Gargrave

Tomorrow we’re leaving the countryside for the hustle and bustle of Skipton. I’ve heard so much about it. Should be fun.

2 July 20212 July 2021

Making Like Buttercup

It isn’t true, as the Beatles will have us believe, that there are 4000 holes in Blackburn Lancashire. There are 4001. And the extra one is the tear in my right retina.

Don’t worry, there will be boating in this blog, and most people who read this know at least part of this story, but here’s the whole for the sake of completeness. If you don’t like talk of matters medical, skip a bit, Brother. (Not you, Jason, that’s a quote from Monty Python.)

The last time I updated the blog we were in Withnell Fold and I’d had a rather nasty fall because I’m clumsy. The next day we set off with our friends Trev and Jenny and the gorgeous Ralf. The plan was I’d drive the boat and Martyn would operate the locks. So there I am approaching the first lock of the six in Blackburn where Jenny on The Life of Reilly is waiting – and my right eye went black; like a wandering spider had crawled across it. I drove the boat in and clonked poor Jen in the process because I couldn’t see. When we got to the top, in full panic mode I called 111 and they told me to go to A&E straight away. They even offered an ambulance. I said no, I’d walk (it was only a mile) only to be told no; I wouldn’t, I’d be in a taxi.

They took a look at me at the Royal Blackburn Hospital and sent me to Burnley General (on the hospital bus!) to the emergency eye clinic. The doctor there diagnosed a posterior vitreous detachment, or PVD, probably due to being shortsighted since birth, possibly due to the fall. There was also a bleed, so I had to come back three days later, by which time they’d really be able to tell what was going on. Three days later was when they found the tear. I made the trip from Burnley to Blackburn this time and underwent laser treatment. We were cruising nowhere for a while. The worst part was being instructed to lie on my left side as much as I could for the next 2 weeks. After the novelty wears off it becomes uncomfortable, and there’s not much you can do perpendicular to the floor with a gammy eye.

Martyn cruised Beau Romer to the visitor moorings at Wheelton at the top of the Johnson’s Hillock Locks. We had friendly faces and all boater facilities there. As the Canal and River Trust kindly allowed us to sit tight on a 48-hour mooring we stayed there for 3 weeks while I healed up.

Now I’m left with a peripheral blind spot, and some really distracting floaters that I’m trying to learn to ignore, but the most important thing is I can see and I’ve been given the okay to move by the hospital. I’m just not allowed to do anything strenuous for another few weeks.

So we are on the go again and if you zoned out you can come back now.

We’re past the halfway point of the canal.

We’re not in Lancashire anymore,, but just over the border in Yorkshire. Trev and Jenny, who have been amazing throughout this whole sorry time, running me backwards and forwards and providing all sorts of help, have remarkably decided we’re doing exactly what we planned a month ago, cruising to Skipton together.

We made it through Blackburn without incident this time. I quite enjoyed the mill towns we’ve seen so far, apart from all the debris in the water. Once upon a time the Blackburn skyline had over 200 chimneys, although thanks to Fred Dibnah and his ilk, few remain. We cruised through some beautiful countryside in Rishton and Church and on to Burnley. It takes us a lot longer by boat than it does whizzing up and down the M65, which is what we’d been getting used to. We’re extremely well acquainted with the motorway. We’ve been over it, under it many times and alongside it for miles. I keep waving at the drivers as they speed by but they don’t see us at 3mph while they’re doing 70.

Granada Television. Now that brings back memories.

We’ve now encountered another of the Seven Wonders of the Waterways, (bonus points for anyone who can tell me the other six!) the Burnley Embankment, or the Straight Mile, which takes you through part of the town, past the back-to-back terraces and Turf Moor (Burnley Football Club’s home ground) at rooftop height.

We’ve just come through the Foulridge Tunnel (the first I’ve driven through from end to end). It’s so nice we did it on the boat and not like the unfortunate Buttercup the cow in the title of this post. In 1912 poor Buttercup fell into the canal at the western end of the tunnel and swam all the way through. That’s no mean feat as it’s 1640 yards long. She had to be revived with brandy when they rescued her at the other end. Dumb bovine – what animal in its right mind would head towards a gaping black hole in the hill instead of staying in the light?

If you were a cow, would you swim into this?

Now we’re on the summit pound of the Leeds and Liverpool Canal, moored up at Salterford and looking forward to a dinner in the pub tonight. From tomorrow I’m expecting to be enjoying the reputedly beautiful Yorkshire Countryside and more good times. Like Buttercup I’m just going to keep swimming and enjoying strong drink!

2 June 20212 June 2021

Wigan – and on, and on

Most people know George Orwell of 1984 fame wrote a book called the Road to Wigan Pier, but in 1946 he also wrote an essay in which he described his ideal pub – the Moon Under Water. In his honour, I hope, there is a Wetherspoons pub in Wigan called The Moon Under Water. Is it the ideal pub? Of course not. But we still had lunch and a couple of drinks there.

In the event we got very well acquainted with Wigan indeed. The plan was we would cruise into Wigan after another nice weekend at Parbold, and go up the 21 locks of the Wigan Flight with Sean on nb Eeyore on Tuesday. But you know what happens with plans? Things tend to happen to wreck them. We got a message just before we set off that there was a car in one of the lock pounds on the Wigan flight, which was closed to boats until it could be removed.

We entered Wigan a little nervously. We’d heard many tales of antisocial behaviour towards boats and boaters, and it wasn’t a place we were anxious to stay. I can only speak from our experience, but that proved to be completely false. We had a quiet mooring and no bother. It helped that there were two boats together. We had plenty of time to explore the town, which has a couple of nice parks and a decent shopping centre. It was perfectly pleasant. On Thursday we watched as the CRT pulled the car, stolen of course, out of the canal.

On Saturday after the queue of boats had cleared on Friday, we tackled the Wigan flight and an extra lock at the bottom for good measure. We had lots of help from the Wigan Flight Crew, all hardy volunteers, and from Trev who got up at 6.30am just to come and help us. Thanks Trev! We got to the top in under 4 hours, where we said au revoir to Sean.

Wigan Flight – up the creek with 138 paddles since 1816!

The next day I got my reward for all those locks. We could have driven to Fredericks Ice Cream Parlour in 20 minutes from our home mooring in Rufford. Far more fun to wait until we could moor up outside on a sunny bank holiday Sunday.

I worked for it, I deserved it, and it totally met my expectations

Then it was on to Johnsons Hillock Locks. At the top we were meeting Trev and Jen to cruise to Skipton with them over the next couple of weeks. It was a good day, the sun was shining, the locks were benign, we had another boat and crew to share with – until I fell over my own feet, or a capstan depending on who tells the story – and literally faceplanted the towpath. Result one split lip, two knees like tennis balls and a badly bruised hand. There will be no photos of me on this blog or social media until I look a little less like someone who’s just done a couple of rounds with Mike Tyson. I have to thank Therese on nb Nauti Buoy who sacrificed the ice that was going into her G&T to my bruises.

So yesterday we went nowhere. Trev suggested a mooring at a lovely hamlet called Withnell Fold, and we had a day of leisure, and for me, recovery. We cleaned the boat and Martyn and I went exploring. It’s a peaceful and picturesque little place, basically a square with houses on three sides and a set of stocks completing it. The village grew up in 1834 to house the workers from a paper mill on the banks of the canal, now long closed, although reputed to have made the paper for our bank notes among other products. If it hadn’t been for my accident we never would have found it. There’s lots of information about it online.

Update on offererings to the Canal Gods:

Another side fender on the Wigan flight

Jenny and Ralf enjoying life on the towpath. What a treasure he is, and what a good boy at only 7 months old

20 May 202121 May 2021

Under Starter’s Orders

In 1770 work began on the Leeds and Liverpool canal, at Halsall, where I’m writing this post. We’re moored outside The Saracen’s Head, and full of the excellent meal we’ve just enjoyed there. Alongside the canal by Bridge 25 there’s a statue known as the Halsall Navvy. He stands there in commemoration, emerging from the ground, full of power and stoicism, and really makes you think about the navigation engineers who dug out the canals, cuttings, and tunnels; who constructed the locks and bridges with nothing more than picks, shovels, wheelbarrows, and their own hard labour.

It’s time to think of beginnings and activity after months of loitering. We’ve been out of the marina for a couple of weeks now, embarking on at least 5 months of travel. We had to wait for the boat to come out of the water to have its cutlass bearing replaced (it’s part of the stern gear – we must have hit something underwater that dislodged it). That was a scary day. I didn’t stay on the boat as it was floated onto a dolly and hauled up a ramp behind a tractor. I saved the white knuckle ride and watching the stern go underwater from the stern itself for Martyn.

All’s good now, apart from an annoying whine we’re all scratching our heads trying to fix. We took a tentative cruise down to Tarleton but didn’t go through the sea lock on to the Ribble Link. We turned around and cruised familiar waters, to Parbold with friends from our marina, and then into Liverpool for a week.

Jim and Diana’s lovely narrowboat Bleasdale waiting for Beau Romer to join them in the lock. We’ve never gone up the Rufford Flight so efficiently!

We couldn’t have asked for a better start to the cruising season. There were 4 Bickerstaffe boats and crews snuggled up in Salthouse Docks. A small rump of the Bickerstaffe Massive was in town.

We enjoyed the thrills of a ghost walk, visited the Museum of Liverpool on the day it re-opened post-lockdown, ate too much good food and drank too much good beer (outside!). We were joined by several friends while we were there, made new ones, took a cruise to the dock system’s far end and generally had a brilliant week.

At this time of the year the canal is teeming with new life. We’ve seen ducklings, Canada goslings (sad the cute little yellow fluffy things must grow up into noisy antisocial Canada Geese), coots and moorhens on their floating nests with almost identical chicks, and tadpoles basking in the rare sunshine. Even the jellyfish in Salthouse Docks are about a quarter of the size of the ones we saw last year. There’s a feeling of new beginnings and optimism.

I’m so relieved I didn’t hit that nest while mooring

On the way back from Liverpool we made a pitstop at Aintree Racecourse, site of the Grand National. I think I must have walked every inch of the 4 miles, 856 yards of the course itself, for that’s where I got my second Covid-19 vaccination and Google Maps let me down. Every gate to every footpath it tried to make me take was locked, so I took an extremely long route from the banks of the canal to the building where the vaccinations were taking place.

To finish this post off, we are known to be more than a little accident-prone. Here’s the list of offerings we have made to the Canal Gods so far since leaving our winter mooring:

One mooring chain
One handcuff key
One LED nightlight
One Jacksonville Jaguars baseball cap
One side fender

Oh dear!

David Foulkes took this photo. He’s one of the CRT volunteer lock keepers (fine people who we appreciate immensely) on the Stanley Flight that takes you down into the Liverpool Docks. The building on the left is the Tobacco Building, the largest brick-built building in the world. It’s being converted into appartments. I hope they don’t disturb the Peregrine Falcons we saw who nest there.

19 January 202119 January 2021

Homeward Bound

Last time I updated this blog in (ahem) October, we’d just left the River Weaver. Time for an update, at least to the end of the cruising season. And it’s nice to reminisce about being out, about and free in these days of winter and Lockdown.

We retraced our steps, back up the Trent and Mersey Canal and on to the Bridgwater, cruised through some marvellous autumn scenery, enjoyed some lovely moorings and had another tasty dinner at the Swan with Two Nicks in Dunham Massey.

At Wigan Junction we waved Trev and Jenny off in the rain. They turned right to go up the Wigan Flight and we turned left for the Rufford Branch and our home mooring. We’d had a wonderful late summer and autumn, and made the most of our first cruising season, but there were rumblings about another nationwide lockdown. We knew if we weren’t back in the marina before any lockdown started, we wouldn’t be allowed back in until it was over. It was definitely time to go home.

Back on home territory just past the deep lock at Appley Bridge, we hit a bit of a snag – pennywort. It’s a floating weed which clumps together and since we’d been off the Leeds and Liverpool it had taken hold. We got a huge raft of it caught around and under the bow of the boat and we were trailing it like some sort of green wedding veil. We couldn’t go forwards, and we couldn’t reverse – we were stuck. Thanks to some very kind passers-by we managed to get a line tied to a tree on the bank and got ashore. Martyn called the CRT for help. Someone turned up and looked at it, but there wasn’t really anything they could do. So we attacked the green carpet with our shovel, knife and boathook. Two hours later, tired, aching, with piles of weed hauled out and on the bank and covered in mud we’d got enough of it away from the front of the boat we could get going. I’ve worked out the way to tackle it is just head for the narrowest bit at full tilt – ramming speed in a narrowboat – and knock the Morse Control into neutral as you get to the weed, hoping the momentum is enough to carry the boat through and it won’t clog the propellor, necessitating a trip down the weed hatch.

Stuck fast – it was worse on the other side of the boat!

That delay cost us, and we couldn’t get home the next day, so we moored exactly where we started on our first night in the face of a dreadful weather forecast. We returned to the marina in the pouring rain the next day, like a pair of drowned rats. Martyn, who didn’t have the good sense to put on a pair of waterproof trousers, was literally wet to the skin and I’m not putting up a photo of that!

Our big cruise to Llangollen and back, according to my records, and making allowance for any arithmetical mistakes, was 303 miles 4.75 furlongs, and 102 locks. It took 164.7 engine hours to complete it.

Our totals for the year are 390 miles, 1.25 furlongs, and 144 locks. Not bad, considering we launched our boat 3 months later than planned due to Covid-19.

I’ll write about what we’ve been up to since we got back next time.

18 October 202018 October 2020

What a Tangled Web We Weave

So much for my intention to update this blog twice week. Twice a month seems to be more like it.

This morning’s towpath view – a factory processing soda ash

At the end of the last post we were effectively stuck at Audlem, on the wrong side of a faulty lock at Hack Green, and facing a long slog home around the Four Counties Ring. I’m typing this on a gloomy Sunday morning in Anderton on the Trent and Mersey Canal, overlooking the River Weaver (or more properly, the Weaver Navigation). In the end, we didn’t have to do make the long trek, including Heartbreak Hill and the Harecastle tunnel. The day after I posted we heard on the towpath telegraph the lock was opened for a short window with CRT assisted passage, so we got through on a miserable wet day and returned to Nantwich. I’m still a bit cheesed off we didn’t get a direct notification, especially as we’d been in contact with the Trust and were signed up for updates. The kindness of a fellow boater saved us.

Jenny waiting for Dutton Lock under a magnificent sycamore

We’ve been travelling with Trev and Jenny as a pair of boats for over a month now, and have enjoyed many, many towpath drinks and competitive games evenings. Martyn taught Jen how to play crib! And we celebrated Martyn’s birthday (12 again) in the Leigh Arms at Acton Bridge. On the Middlewich Branch we met up with fellow Bickerstaffe owners Pat and Eileen from Our Narrowboat Quest for a brief towpath chat. We last saw them at Christmas, so that was really nice. And Dave helped us through Cholmondeston Lock again. I might even have made him late for work …

Just what was I supposed to do with these letters?

I think we were in some ways slightly disappointed to have escaped from the broken lock with no drama. With a complete inability to learn what happens if we complicate things, we hatched up another idea. We were going to spend a week on the River Weaver before leaving for home. As this had never been part of anyone’s plan, Trev had to buy an anchor in Middlewich. It’s inadvisable to boat on a river without an anchor to deploy in an emergency. Rivers are deep and have hazards canals don’t, such as weirs and currents.

Our trip down the Anderton Boat lift on a gloriously sunny Sunday

The River Weaver is 50 feet below the Trent and Mersey Canal, and to get to it by boat you have to use the Anderton Boat Lift. This is a remarkable piece of engineering built-in 1875. It is a steel structure with 2 giant buckets filled with water, or caissons (weighing 252 tonnes each!). The system works on hydraulic rams, and when one caisson goes up, the other goes down. Along with the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct, the boat lift is one of the wonders of our canal and river system and not one we expected to experience this year.

Beau Romer exiting the Anderton Boat Lift onto the River Weaver, and looking very tiny

The River Weaver is beautiful, especially this time of the year, and remarkably quiet. We had countryside moorings mostly to ourselves and enjoyed the peace and quiet, the misty mornings and the scenery. The stretch between Saltersford Locks and the services near the M56 motorway at Sutton Swing Bridge is one of the prettiest we’ve cruised so far. And all the locks are operated by lock keepers. Just as well, because they’re enormous.

A quick meet and greet with an old friend at Hunts Lock, hello Lindsay

Feeling very insignificant in Saltersford Lock

We didn’t need the anchors, but Martyn did slip on a wet pontoon, and nearly took an impromptu dip. Thankfully all he got was a boot full of water!

The beautiful River Weaver and traiiiiin!

Now we’re heading back to our marina. A bit sad to be doing so. Autumn boating is lovely.