Down Bosley once more

3rd & 4th January

Needing to be up in good time, we'd set the central heating to come on at 7. Since the Eberspacher starting up sounds like there's a 747 in the engine 'ole running its engines up before take off, this makes an effective alarm clock.

By 7.30 we were getting up, and on our way by half eight. At 9.15 we were passing through the Royal Oak swing bridge, and were watering at the top of Bosley by 10.

The top lock was with us, but the next few were empty. An unconverted working boat passed us at lock 4, and said that there were some BW boats coming up behind them, so he'd been back setting some of the locks for them. This meant, since he'd got well ahead of them, that we had to turn number six around, which was a right pain, holding Sanity above the lock in a fresh breeze.

We found the first of the BW boats at 7, a guy on his own, bow hauling a flat. He seemed quite cheerful about it, saying that he was at least keeping warm.

By the time we had Sanity into 7, we could see activity at 8. It proved to be a second flat being push towed by a tug. The two guys on it then gave a short demo of total incompetence, such as you'd be mildly surprised to find in a novice, much less supposedly experienced boaters (pause for cynical laughter from some of my readers. BW staff used all to be ex-working boaters, and had indeed forgotten more about boating than I will ever know. Now, however, they have to employ whomever they can get, and since they only pay peanuts...)

The flat had the usual square bow, and lock 8 has steel frame gates. They'd managed to get the bow stuck under the beam of one of the gates, and as the boat rose in the lock, it had started to lift the gate out of its quoin. This had prised open the mitre between the two top gates, and the resulting flood of water into the flat's well deck had quickly reached the level of the ventilator in the bow door, and started to fill the cabin.

They'd had to close the top paddles and hastily draw the bottom ones to let the flat lower itself out from under the gate, and then reverse it away from the water still cascading through between the gates.

When I got there, one of them was standing on the lockside, shouting to his mate inside the cabin (the last place he should have been in a boat at risk of sinking). Eventually the mate emerged with a bucket, and they started to bail the well deck with it, until they could reach down to the drain hole through the hull side. This had been allowed to become blocked, itself an outstandingly stupid thing to do when locking a boat uphill – there's always the risk of shipping water into the well, even if you don't try to dismantle the top gates with the boat's bow.

Eventually they got their act more or less together, though it was left to me to draw the top paddles, despite the fact that one of them was wandering around with two windlasses (one for each hand?)

After all this fun, we got to the bottom just after twelve, having taken two hours for the flight including unscheduled entertainment. The only problem we had then was finding a mooring at the bottom where we could get a smidgen of phone signal. It wouldn't normally have mattered – we'd warned Elanor we might be out of touch, and anyone else in the family trying to get us would check with her if they couldn't raise us.

The thing was, we were expecting a visit from a guy called Andrew Wilkinson. Sheila had met him earlier on at Braidbar. He's doing a foundation degree course in photography, and for one of his projects is taking photos of people who live in boats. We'd arranged by email to meet him at the foot of the flight, and were expecting a confirmatory phone call from him during lunch.

I just about managed to get things working in time to speak to him, and he turned up just after lunch. We were glad we'd gone to the trouble – he's an interesting guy and it was good to be able to help him with his project. We look forward to seeing the final result in due course – since he's doing the course in Northwich, we should be able to meet up with him again during the winter.

I did a bit of photography myself just as he arrived – the bottom lock, 12, had the most amazing fountain of water emerging from the side wall; not the usual "pisser", which is where there's a void behind the brick or stone work of the lock wall. This fills when the lock does, and then when the lock empties, it, er, all comes out. There was a big one of those half way down the offside, Sheila said, but this other one didn't stop when the lock was empty, but kept on going – it must be fed from the pound above, so that it's running all the time the lock is empty, slowly wearing away the ground behind the lock...

After all the excitement we had a quiet evening, and a reasonably lazy start this morning. Even so, we were away by 9.30, and at Congleton by 11. We trekked down into town, looking for a copy shop type place to get our new BW licences laminated. This worked so well last year we want to do it again this, but Congleton doesn't quite run to such a thing. Nonetheless, we got some shopping done, and had lunch before plodding off again, into deteriorating and darkening weather.

We got to Heritage marina at last, and after a short wait, were able to get a pump out and to fill up with diesel. We needed 125 litres at 65 pence, plus £15 for a very average pump out. I also bought an oil filter, and in due course found myself keying in my credit card PIN for a bill of £105. And BW are massively increasing the licence fee and mooring fees over the next three years, saying that there's lots more boats coming onto the water, so people must be prepared to pay more.

I wonder if they've heard of that quaint old term in economics, a bubble?

We then chugged on to Hall Green moorings for the night – tomorrow the Cheshire Locks for the first time since we came up them in September 2005.