Cleaning the boat and stocking up on fuel

3rd & 4th November

First job on a damp morning was to boat round to the visitor moorings for Macclesfield town centre. I’ve ranted about the poor state of these moorings before, so I won’t go into all that again. We did the ten minute walk to the big Tesco, and did a good topping up type shop, especially for fruit and veg. Back at the boat, we pulled forward onto the water point and started refilling the tank.

Whilst this was going on, the working coal boat Anne went by, on its way to turn beyond Gurnett. Sheila told Mr Hooper that we were after coal, but that we would be gone before he came back and that we’d look out for him when we moored at Bollington.

Duly refilled, we went on to that village. We’d planned to moor at the second set of moorings, those by the aqueduct, as opposed to those by the Adelphi Mill, so as to have a view down the valley of any fireworks that might be about.

These moorings were full, however, with a load of what looked like very slowly cruising residential boats, so we plodded on, getting wetter and hungrier (it was well into lunchtime by now) and finally found a mooring just into the countryside beyond bridge 26.

After lunch, Anne turned up and we bought ten 25 kg bags of Pureheat from him. This also prompted us to sweep the roof again, it having been covered in yet more leaves whilst we were at Gurnett.

We did indeed get a good view of the local fireworks from here. We spent about half an hour standing on the stern, twisting our heads this way and that to see the bursts in the sky, and hear the oddly disconnected bangs and bumps from them.

Today we’ve carried on the cleaning theme, though I took the time (on a glorious, clear, cold morning) to walk back into the village and buy a paper, milk and bread. It’s possible to do a number of walks from here, utilising the Middlewood Way and the canal towpath.

We did a thorough clean of the inside of the boat, sweeping it through, damp dusting the surfaces and then washing the floor. This took us up to lunchtime. After lunch I took everything out of the engine room and gave it the same treatment, whilst Sheila sorted the office desk.

This way we can turn up at the Braidbar yard tomorrow and look them in the eye!