Barnton to Marbury Park

27th & 28th January

After I'd done the last blog, we settled down to a meal of haggis, neeps (and carrots) and tatties, having impulse bought a haggis at the Co-op yesterday. Well, it was Burns Night the night before, and we like haggis; it's just a bit strange to find it in a north Cheshire co-op, that's all.

Yesterday being Sunday, and with nowhere to go, we had a lazy start, and I wandered up to the village to get a paper at around 10. On the way back I noted that the two moorings in the basin between the tunnel mouth and the bridge were empty, so when I got back to the boat, we set off through the bridge and tunnel, and winded in the pool between the two tunnels.

We then had to wait before going back through Barnton, as the Challenger boat Charlton was just coming through. I must admit (to save Sheila commenting) that I hadn't really expected to find a boat coming the other way, and had to do a bit of an emergency stop in the tunnel mouth before backing out.

Finally back through the tunnel, we moored on the aforesaid spot in Barnton Basin. There was just time before lunch for me to go and take some pictures of the tunnel ventilators, one of which was looking quite dilapidated. Some of us have agreed to take shots of BW structures looking in bad nick, for SOW to use as propaganda on their website. If BW can't do better than this when they had got half decent funding, what's it going to be like now they are severely under funded?

After lunch I experimented with the PhotoShop web album facility again, but then we decided it was too nice an afternoon to rot in the boat all day, so went for a walk. We found part of a pleasant network of footpaths in the area, going part of the way over the tunnel, then down towards the river, and finally back along the riverside to come out at the pool between the tunnels.

Here we had a natter with a guy off one of the boats wintering in the pool. He'd been spending his time clearing the scrub away from some of the footpaths, thus making them less attractive to the local youth. They had clearly been in the habit of retreating there to experiment with various substances, judging by the presence of lager cans, lighter fuel aerosols, needles and syringes.

It just shows the importance of having some winter boaters around to discourage the development of potential no-go areas like that. As it was, a gang had, just the night before, pushed some of the coping stones off the parapet over the western mouth of Barnton Tunnel, so that they were now lying in the water in the tunnel mouth.

I hadn't got my camera with me, but did have the phone, so took a couple of shots with that. Back at the boat, I included those in the album with the earlier pictures and put it up on the website. I'm not sure about the PhotoShop web gallery facility – it takes more fiddling around in Dreamweaver to put my templates on the output satisfactorily, and I suspect it makes a bulkier folder compared to the more basic job that iPhoto does. I'll have to ponder this a bit more, I guess.

Today was another lazy start, as we had to wait for the Post Office to have had its mail delivery. When I called in at around 10, our letter had come from Elanor, so we could set off again on the next phase of the winter's boating, heading for Ellesmere on the Llangollen.

In fact we got as far as Anderton, where I winded Sanity to back onto the service point with the pump out hole next to the bank. There was another small boat already there, setting up to use the BW card operated pump out machine. They'd got two new cards, but neither was working. While we rigged our pump, the guy went off to consult in the BW office at the lift, and in a while came back with a fresh card.

It was still no good. By this time, our pump out was well on, so we offered to pump them out with our machine. This was accomplished by tying their boat outside Sanity, so that the pump would both reach their pump out fitting, and be able to run off its power supply in Sanity's engine room

While this was going on, a BW guy turned up, and admitted that the machine had been reported defective during the weekend. Eventually all was done, and it now being well into lunch time, we just pulled forward onto the visitor moorings for the time being.

After lunch, we winded again, and headed round the corner to the towpath at Marbury Park. Here we spent a bit of time sawing wood, and I gave the starboard cabin side a quick wash, as it was looking disgustingly muddy. We don't spend a lot of time washing the boat in the winter – there's no point, but it is nice to clean the mud and bird doings off it from time to time.