A day for SOW, and a day for boating

10th & 11th April

Yesterday I was due to be collected from the car park of the Barley Mow at 9.30, so it was one of those no-rush starts to the day. My lift, Richard, in fact rang at 9.15 to say he'd arrived, and we had a quick trip up the M6/M6 Toll in his nice motor.

We got to the Stafford Boat Club before 10.30, to find Will Chapman and my old sparring partner Roger Millin already there and getting themselves sorted out. The Inaugural Meeting of the Save Our Waterways organisation went very well. SBC is a great club, with lots of spirit, and they generously share this with their guests. We had a very pleasant lunch about half way through the day's business, and things were wrapped up just on 3.30.

Obviously, the best way to find out about SOW is to visit the website, but in a nutshell, the aim is not to compete for members with any of the existing organisations and associations like the IWA, NABO or RBOA, but to seek to recruit those casual visitors to the towpath who make up the vast majority of people who benefit from the canal or river being there.

About 95% of all waterways visitors are non-boaters, and many of those don't realise the parlous state of the funding arrangements for the maintenance of our waterway heritage. By paying a fiver, these people can do their part in supporting a campaign to get things settled on a sustainable basis, in particular by seeking to broaden the sources of public funding to include local authorities and Government Departments other than DEFRA.

Richard was not returning South after the meeting, but I was able to get a lift back with Simon Robbins of NABO, and we were back in Sanity having a cup of tea by half five.

Being pleasantly tired after all this gadding about, I didn't feel much like cooking anything, so we went to the Barley Mow for a meal. It's not long changed hands, and the new owners were very eager to please. It was a pleasant meal – nothing flashy, but honest pub food, well cooked and good portions.

The Barley Mow has some accommodation, and the new owners have decided to let it out to some contractors working on the West Coast Mainline nearby. It guarantees them some income, and the lads we saw were well behaved, if perhaps rough diamonds, as you'd expect in the heirs to the navvies who built the canals. I just wonder how the mix will work out with holiday boaters, locals from this upmarket suburb of Rugby, and these guys.

Whatever, I wish the new owners every success, and can certainly recommend the pub for a decent meal.

Today we wanted to get a number of things done before lunch, so set off before nine, mooring at the Tesco mooring just on that hour. We had a fair amount of shopping to do, and it's a bit of a walk from the canal to the store. They have the usual locking trolley wheel arrangement to stop you taking the trolley out of the car park, but when we enquired at the service desk, we were assured that they could send someone with us to unlock the wheel so that we could take one large trolley load to the boat, rather than having to do two trips with full day sacks.

So we filled the trolley with milk and fruit juice and wine boxes and cans of bitter and lager, and after checking it out, went back to the desk to ask for this service. When the lad in question came, he said oh no, the tool for unlocking the wheels was broken. He came with us, however, and after we'd wheeled the trolley over the red line and it had locked, mysteriously produced another one which was functional.

I didn't see how he did it – I suspect that you have to pick it up and hold it over your head to avoid the magnetic field that triggers the locking mechanism. Anyway, we transferred the load from one trolley to the other, and wheeled it back to the boat.

I stowed the stuff while Sheila took the trolley back to the store, and we set off again. Next stop was Clifton Cruisers, where we took on just over 100 litres of diesel at 70 ppl, and had a boatyard pump out for once. It started to rain and hail quite seriously as we finished, so I was huddled on my own on the back for the last bit of boating for the day, round to the moorings at the foot of Hillmorton Locks.

We've spent the afternoon doing some internet stuff, albeit on a slow connection, and changing the bed.

Tomorrow it's up the locks and round to Braunston for the weekend, so Sheila is hoping that the April hailstones will hold off until we get there.