Through Harecastle and onto the Macc

28th & 29th October

It came on to rain overnight, and we woke to a seriously wet day. What a good job we’d decided not to move. By mid morning the rain had eased, so we walked to Barlaston to buy a paper and some milk. There are two possible sources of these goodies in Barlaston – a Londis right by the canal, and another similar shop just a little further down the road in the other direction.

We had been boating past here for years before we bought the relevant First Mate Guide and discovered this other little parade of shops, including a butcher and a pharmacist.

Back at the boat, we settled down to enjoy a wet Sunday, reading, knitting and doing IT housekeeping. I use a free program called ClamXav to keep the nasties away from the iBook, and just occasionally take the time to run it over the entire hard disk, rather than just the usual data files. As a Mac user, viruses are less of a worry, as I’ve said before, but I still don’t want to be the unwitting cause of infection in someone else’s machine (by forwarding something that I hadn’t realised was infected because the virus is powerless against the Unix base of Mac OS X).

After lunch it brightened up a bit so we took another walk along the canal, just to stretch legs and avoid postprandial dozing.

Today, Monday, we made an early start, as we wanted to get right through Harecastle Tunnel and onto the Macc by the end of the day. We were away by 8, and up Trentham Lock by 8.30. One thing about going back to GMT, it makes it easier to get up early in the morning for a few days.

It was a cold but bright, sunshiny day, so boating was very pleasant provided you were well wrapped up.

When we got to the first Stoke Lock, Sheila got the bike out and cycled between the others. The first one was empty, but the rest against us, so we were pleased to make it to the top by 10.30, a time of two and a half hours from the Wedgwood mooring to the top of Stoke.

We stopped briefly above the top lock – the bow fender had snapped its strop (again) rising up the deep cill of the top lock, which instead of having a nice smooth rising board for the lower part, had a bunch of edge-on wooden sleepers, and the friction had been just too much for the strength of the strop.

We got to the South portal of Harecastle at 12, and had a brief (for him) chat with Ivor Bachelor, the tunnel keeper there. We (as many another) know him quite well to chat to, having been a customer of his in the days when he sold coal and logs from his pair Mountbatten and Jellicoe at Braunston.

There was no one else waiting at either end of the tunnel so we went straight in, taking 37 minutes to pass through. Sheila had her lunch as we went through, and I started mine as she steered the short pound from the North portal to the junction with the Macc at Red Bull.

We tied there while I finished my sarnies, then walked over to Tesco to do a supermarket shop. There’s just room for one boat on the towpath just on the tunnel side of the junction, and that’s the nearest approach to the Tesco.

Then it was merrily on, turn left onto the Macc, boat round past Red Bull yard and cross over the T&M on an aqueduct. Through Hall Green stop lock, and onto the visitor moorings just beyond.

As usual, these moorings were irritatingly cluttered with local boats overstaying. Polleeanna is a notable offender in this respect – she has a legit mooring just a bit further up the canal, but her owner seems to prefer to keep her on the 48 hour mooring by the stop lock. Boats with deliberately misspelt names irritate me anyway, so it’s doubly annoying.

On the positive side, we wouldn’t have got in here if it hadn’t been for the crew of Enchantress, who had just arrived on the last space, but proceeded to squeeze up so that we could get in too.