Wild and wet and in a strop with BW

2nd & 3rd December

It was a wild night and a wild morning, so we stayed in bed as long as possible. When hunger finally drove us forth, we decided quite quickly to stay put until today (Monday) in the hopes of better weather. The limiting factor is, as so often, the state of the water tank and the laundry bag. If we don’t run a wash load, a full tank will last about five days, but sooner or later you run out of clean clothes.

I took advantage of a brief break in the rain to go into Bollington for a paper, but otherwise we settled down for a day in the boat.

Our BW licence needs to be renewed by the end of this month, and the documentation had arrived at Elanor’s. She emailed us the two numbers you need to renew online, so I started out to do this, feeling full of virtue at getting it done in good time.

But oh no, we can’t use the online facility. Because Sanity is less than four years old, we don’t yet need a Boat Safety Certificate, the waterways equivalent of an MoT. Instead, we are allowed to rely on the Declaration of Conformity to the European Directive on Leisure Craft. Boats in our position can’t be relicensed online (why?) so Elanor will have to post the documents to us care of Braidbar, and we will have to post them on to BW. In a word, AAAARGH!

To cheer myself up, I chose some of the best of the photos of Daniel that we had brought back from Boothby Graffoe on a memory stick and made them into a webpage. I’ve put them on the main site, here.

Later in the day, I had some email correspondence with John Denny, a new member of the Braidbar Owners Group. There’s a Braidbar for sale on the Boatfinder website, Gadfell, but it doesn’t feature on the Braidbar Boats Register that we keep. It must have been renamed at some point. We’re waiting to hear if anyone in the Group knows anything about her.

The weather this morning was completely different, bright and cold, so we set off for Macclesfield, with the intention of watering, shopping at Tesco and then going on to Gurnett Aqueduct for the night. On the way, we passed a kingfisher sitting in a bush by the side of the canal. It’s really unusual to have one sit tight and not fly on before you get there.

Sod’s Law being what it is, as we approached the water point, the heavens opened again, and we watered and shopped in a downpour. Heigh ho, what can’t be changed must be endured I guess, though it’s still hard to take that attitude to BW.

The other downer was the state of the towpath at the water point. I’ve commented before (along with others like Andrew Denny) on the poor mooring at Macc, but today the grass was decorated with more dog poo than I’ve ever seen anywhere else, and we’ve endured some dire encounters with it in our time. There was a heap every couple of feet for the entire length of the water point and visitor mooring. This makes positioning the hose tricky, to say the least.

After lunch we chugged on our way – the rain was a bit easier, and we moored at Gurnett in comparatively dry conditions. It is however, tipping it down again as I type this, so I suspect that we are here for a couple of nights.