Whirling down to Wheelock

7th & 8th January

One thing I forgot to mention last time; the strange phenomenon of the night time biker. Whilst we were moored at the top of Church Locks, normally a perfectly peaceful mooring bar the noise of the road a couple of fields away, I heard a biker pass by the boat at three in the morning. It sounded like a small engined bike – either a small trail bike or one of those "sixteener specials".

I lay and pondered it in the dark, and finally concluded, since it was Saturday night, that it must be some late night reveller, too drunk to risk riding on the road, and using the towpath. This theory was blown away by what sounded very like the same bike coming back at 4.30 or so, and then past again just before five. Certainly broke up my night's sleep, though Sheila kipped on through it all.

Very odd, not to say irritating.

Anyway, back to our Hassal Green mooring and yesterday, Monday. Since the weather forecast was dire for the day, and there seemed to be a window of better stuff on Tuesday morning, we decided to stay put. Thus we were able to have a lie in until gone 9, and then potter round the boat, cleaning mostly. The internet connection wasn't desperately fast, GPRS rather than 3G, but I did clock that I'd had a sudden burst of traffic to the site on Sunday. This is odd, as the weekend is normally quieter – methinks there's a good bunch of you out there reading this from work :-}.

Any way, it's good to know that there's a slow but steady increase of readers – I do this blog for fun, but if folks pick up hints and tips, or just enjoy some vicarious cruising, that's great. It also encourages me to sit down and get on with it on those days when applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair is a bit harder than usual.

It's also worth saying by way of reassurance that although the Sitemeter counter I use can tell me when folks are viewing the site, and what part of the world they are from, it doesn't enable me to know who they are – the IP addresses are anonymised. It is fun to know that, at times, about 30% of the traffic comes from outside the UK, though.

As well as cleaning the boat, we took the opportunity to turn out one of the lockers under the side berth in the study bedroom. We'd seen a bit of black mould appearing in a corner of the bathroom next door, and wanted to be sure that it wasn't coming from behind the partition.

In any event, it's a good idea to turn these lockers out occasionally, in order to remember what's in there. In fact all seemed to be well – there was a bit of condensation forming in the locker, but nothing drastic. In the Spring, it will be good to turn it out again and air the stuff that's in there, that's all.

The black in the bathroom must be condensation related too – it's the curse of a boat at this time of year, and by and large we keep it under control. It's just that there are one or two spots around the cabin where there's not much air circulation, and so condensation and mould can form.

I also turned out one of the kitchen cupboards, the one with most of the food cans in it. In accordance with the third law of thermodynamics, it had slowly disorganised itself over time, and it was quite satisfying to haul it all out and repack it neatly.

The only other thing of particular note yesterday was a woman walking two Samoyed dogs past the boat. For those who don't know them, Sams are delightful – white and fluffy and very human oriented. They were bred to share tent space with their Siberian owners originally. We used to keep them ourselves, but on a boat they can cause a bit of mess – mud dries in the coat and then drops off in a pile on the floor, and the coat itself has a soft white underlayer, like cotton wool, that sheds in all directions.

If you've ever tried to vacuum cotton wool off a rug or carpet, you can imagine the problem. Seemingly this woman goes boating with both these dogs, so must have been well used to extensive boat cleaning.

This morning we made an early start to take advantage of the "better" weather. In fact it rained for much of the time, and Sheila, who was steering, found the wind a bit tricky if she had to hover above a lock waiting for it to fill.

Nonetheless, we made decent time, starting just after eight, and coming out of the bottom of the Wheelock flight, ten locks later, just after 10. We went onto the water point, filled up and then Sheila reversed Sanity back to the visitor moorings we'd just passed.

It's been an afternoon for the internet. First I had a comment from blogger A Different Voice, admitting that she'd used a photo of mine in a post about a truly bad first experience of hiring a narrowboat. She draws some very sensible conclusions from it, though, and her blog is well worth a visit.

Andrew on Granny Buttons also referred to her use of the photo – thanks for the plug, Andrew – this makes a sort of three way family favourites hook up!

The other bit of excitement is that the well known and well established shared ownership scheme, Challenger Syndicateships, has gone into administration. I was commenting only a few days ago about the danger of the boating bubble bursting, and this could be one symptom of just that happening.

More bad weather forecast for the next day or two, so we may be here for a couple of days yet.