Firewood and water

30th & 31st October

It felt like sleeping in, but we woke at 7.30. I decided to make a stew for dinner, which meant buying potatoes, so I trolled back to Tesco, a walk of about 20 minutes from Hall Green. On the way, I found Frilford locking down the Red Bull Locks single handed, and stopped to close a pair of bottom gates for him.

It was a dry day after a very wet night, and the boating to the Little Morton Hall mooring at Bridge 86 was quite pleasant. We got there at around coffee time, and settled to a quiet day. Exercise was had by walking back to look at the restoration of the fancy railings by Ramsdell Hall, and to take some photos of the crazy situation a little further back by the Heritage marina.

Andrew Denny has given a full account of this in his blog, so I won’t go over the whole sad tale again – it’s basically a case of one NIMBY forcing BW to spend a load of money it hasn’t got, because he doesn’t like boats mooring within view of his house. BW has restored a reed bed (on the towpath side!) where it had made some handy moorings, and is now piling the bank on the other side of the bridge hole to replace the moorings.

Main internet event was an email from the IWA about the current plan by BW to raise boat licence fees by 9% above inflation for each of the next three years. Although boaters only account for a few per cent of the folks who visit the canals every year, it seems we are to carry the brunt of the funding shortfall caused by the reduction of grant-in-aid from Defra.

Today we made a reasonably early start, cruising to Congleton to do some shopping and look at the prices of DVD players in the Argos catalogue. At the moment we use the iBook to play DVDs, but this isn’t so good if one of us wants to do computer stuff and the other wants to watch a DVD. We are just at the stage of considering the options, but I can see us finding an excuse to buy a portable DVD player for Christmas.

After this we went on to the water point on the offside by Bridge 68, and made our lunchtime sandwiches whilst the tank was filling. Then it was off again to the foot of Bosley Locks where we are now. It’s a good mooring, except the Vodafone signal is absolutely dire, so any comms from the family will have to be by text or email tonight.

Other highlights of the day – collecting a goodly amount of firewood from the canal as we boated along, and seeing one of my favourite boat names.

The firewood included a huge chunk of scaffold plank. Sheila was steering, and I could hardly lift the monster into the bow. She put the boat over onto the towpath for me to try to lift the wood onto the roof, but I only succeeded in getting it onto the bank – the boat wouldn’t come close enough to lift it onto the roof with any safety.

So I lugged it to the next bridge hole, which was a narrow beast, originally a swing bridge but now a little foot bridge. At this point, She discovered she couldn’t get Sanity to come off the bank and we spent a happy few minutes with shafts and reversing manoeuvres until she consented to move along again.

Once in the bridge hole, it wasn’t too difficult to get things sorted out, and off we went again.

My favourite boat name here? Ferric the Red, just as you come into Congleton. There’s a few of these I look out for every time, like the one at Polesworth called Will Power. Only that one gives me what the Germans call an earworm for the 70’s (?) pop track – damn, there it goes again... “Will power/ it’s now or/ never/ pom pom pom.” I’ll be at it all evening now.

Late news - Andrew has published his Braidbar post on his blog.