Down the Cheshire Locks

5th & 6th January

First a follow on to some remarks in the last blog and a comment from Jeremy. Whilst it's true, as Jeremy says, that there can be advantages from a bubble for those to who see it through, in terms of benefiting from the investment made during the upside, my concern is that BW is making a fundamental error in its income strategy.

There's much more detail about this on the SOW website, but, in a nutshell, at present BW does not receive enough income to cover what it calls its steady state needs, that is, the cash it needs to maintain the system as it is. Since there remains a maintenance backlog, this is a potentially disastrous situation. Some of us can remember all too well the seventies and eighties, when significant bits of the system were cut off from each other by closed tunnels and the like.

BW's income comes from three main sources: income from boating activities, from its property portfolio, and a Government grant-in-aid. The present BW chief exec, Robin Evans, has explicitly stated that he wants to reduce dependence on the grant-in-aid. The trouble is, the vast majority of visitors to the waterways (about 97%) are not boaters, but are towpath walkers, cyclists, anglers and the like. There's no easy way to extract much income from these people, except indirectly from pubs and cafes and so on. Since income from boating already makes up at least 10% of BW's top line, many of us feel that substantial funding from general taxation via the grant-in-aid is only fair.

Meantime, of course, the property income has not kept growing as quickly as Mr Evans hoped, as the economic downturn starts to bite. I've done a longer paper on some of these issues – it's on the main website here.

Getting back to our cruising: yesterday we made a leisurely start, and wended our way through Hall Green stop lock to moor just before the junction with the Trent and Mersey to go shopping at the local Tesco. After an early lunch, we set off down the Red Bull locks, closely followed by a guy single handing Serendipity.

We both stopped for water, then carried on to the top of Church Locks for the night. Sheila got the bow saw out to cut up the bits and bobs of wood we'd accumulated on the roof. A passer-by (there were plenty of walkers out and about in the sun) gave her the benefit of his advice along the lines of "you need to have the wood higher so you can cut horizontally, and you need a new blade in that bow saw".

He then commented that he was probably teaching his grandmother to suck eggs, and Sheila, who at one stage worked in the School of Agricultural and Forest Sciences at Bangor, managed to avoid a pithy response (just).

Today was another day for a relaxed start, and we chugged off at around ten o'clock. It was an absolutely beautiful morning, sunny, no wind to speak of, and occasional patches of very thin ice on the cut.

We carried on down the locks – Church, Halls, the Lawton three, then a pause at Rode Heath to dump some recycling in the bins in the Broughton Arms car park, and to buy a paper at the handy store just over the road. After that it was Thurlwood and Pierrepoint locks before tying for the day above Hassal Green.

Serendipity had still been following on, and where appropriate we'd been setting a lock for him, especially where the locks were paired, as many of them are on this stretch. Thus if both are against you, and there's no sign of anyone coming up, it's only the work of a moment to draw a top paddle on the lock you are not using for the benefit of the boat behind. This is particularly appropriate when that boat is single handing as Serendipity was (unless you count his very laid back German Shepherd, which mostly sat and observed proceedings from the stern deck.)

I was just getting ready to do an oil change, when Serendipity came past. He stopped alongside, and gave us two crusty bread rolls, in appreciation of our help with the locks. "I usually do a baking on a Sunday", he said.

Now that's the spirit of boating for you.