A day to boat, and a day to loaf

4th & 5th September

It's been a couple of days when attention to the Met Office site has paid dividends. We knew that yesterday was not going to be very nice, but today would be even worse, so we planned to get as much done as we could in the half decent conditions.

We got away before half eight, ready togged up in waterproofs (there's no such thing as bad weather, only inappropriate clothing for the conditions). The cloud soon thickened enough to start raining, so that by the time we got to the foot of Bosley it was quite chilly; the thought of warming up on the flight was sufficiently attractive that I handed the tiller over to Sheila for the first half and set off up hill.

We met a fair few boats coming down, especially after half way up. These included a group of three women in a hire boat who were clearly not enjoying it as much as they might. A shame, but it's surprising how rarely you do see folks really not getting a buzz out of boating. By half twelve we were in the long pound below the top lock and stopped for lunch.

Our plan had been to stop the night there, but we couldn't get Sanity to lie comfortably against the towpath, thanks to the Macc's rounded profile and the fact that my nice new fenders made with Mr Flockhart's "Victory Black" don't sink, but float to the surface if you try to lower them far enough down to sit between the base plate edge and the wash wall.

The weather had picked up a bit, so we decided to carry on to Gurnett Aqueduct and then sit tight if today proved to be as bad as forecast. It took just over an hour and a half to do the trip, and we found a surprising amount of space when we got here.

Gurnett's one of those funny mooring spots. It's the best place to tie to visit Macclesfield, as I've said before, and sometimes you're hard put to it to find a space at any time of day. At other times, it's virtually deserted, as this time. It has another advantage over the moorings near Bosley; the mobile phone signals are markedly better, especially the T-mobile data signal.

In the course of the afternoon, a few more boats turned up and tried various mooring positions, and some of them then stopped the night. They all set off again this morning, despite the fact that the forecast proved if anything to have been optimistic. It's been raining hard most of the day, with some severe gusts of wind to boot.

It's given us a chance to do some postgraduate loafing for the first time for ages. It seems to have been a very busy summer, and we really need to concentrate on getting back into laid back mode for the winter.

Be that as it may, we lit the fire first thing, left the cratch cover down and spent the day catching up with some paperwork (like Sheila's passport renewal) and downloading and playing with the calibre software. This is in anticipation of me buying Sheila a Sony Reader for her birthday. (It's one of the milestones, but I'm not allowed to say which. The free bus pass will come in handy, though. Ooops.)

The Reader sounds to be the one best suited for what we want it for, i.e. reading lots of straightforward books, but Sony's Connect software doesn't run on the Mac. This is a bit surprising really, as the typesetting for most books will still be done using QuarkXpress on a Mac, so you'd think e-versions would be easier for that platform, but there you go.

calibre, however comes in versions for all three major OS (Mac, Linux and Windows) and seems to be very good for the purpose. Can't actually check all its features until we've got the Reader, of course, but it's certainly an effective Library Management tool.

The rest of the time we've been reading, knitting and watching a DVD. Tomorrow we'll stagger on as far as Lyme View marina, probably, going onto Poynton on Sunday.

Oh, and fave email sig of the day: "People who talk by the yard and think by the inch, end up being kicked by the foot..."