Pump outs and caches

23rd & 24th February

The cunning plan yesterday was to make a prompt start so as to get both shopping and a pump out done before boating on. This worked reasonably well, except that the bakers didn't have any bread ready by the time we were there, just after they opened at nine.

It's all baked on the premises, but clearly they don't start in the middle of the night in the way small bakers used to do.

By half nine we were on the service point doing our first self pump out for quite a time. You could tell that we'd had a number of commercial pump outs by the amount of sludge we rinsed out of the bottom of the tank. Fortunately, my mods to the power supply to the pump had made a distinct difference, with a lot more suck going on, but it still took quite a while to get even two good rinses through the tank.

We'll do another one at Nantwich, probably, so that we begin to make an impression on the state of the tank. If you don't keep clearing the sludge out, it eventually begins to set on the bottom, so that you permanently lose capacity. It is just so hard to persuade boatyards that it makes a difference using the proper rinse out line, rather than just pouring water down the pump out connection and sucking it back out again.

By half ten we were away once more, and worked up Filance, Otherton, Rodbaston and Boggs Locks, tying just before lunch between Boggs and Brick Kiln. There was much less traffic about this week, as expected, and there continues to be a Spring like feel to the air, so we are really getting the benefit of our lifestyle at the moment.

After lunch we walked back to Boggs Lock and found the Life in the Slow Lane geocache. Back at the boat, I improved the shining hour by taking advantage of an unexpectedly fast internet connection to do another post on the Building Sanity Again blog, on heating systems. It's already attracted some interesting comments about the merits of the various options, which is very gratifying.

Today we had only a short bit of boating to do, as we'd decided to stop just beyond Gailey, just before Hatherton Junction, in fact, at Long Moll's Bridge. This was because we'd spotted a whole set of caches, mostly on the towpath, around here, using the excellent waymarked Long Moll's Walk.

I worked Sanity up the remaining two locks, and we stopped to top up the water tank and post a letter before ambling on to our mooring. I also took a photo of the Round House at Gailey, as we'd dropped off a Travel Bug called Otto's Lighthouse in the last cache, and its owner had asked for photos of other towers to be added to its web page.

We still got tied up well before lunch, so ran a washload of socks to take advantage of the fact that the engine needed to be left running to finish charging the batteries.

After lunch we duly walked just under five miles, finding all seven caches, about which we felt very pleased with ourselves, especially as the last three were tiny micro caches of the kind which previously have given us much more trouble.

It was interesting to note that several other boaters had been there before us, and we particularly admired No Problem Sue's fancy laminated cards which she leaves in caches she finds.

The rest of the afternoon has passed quite quietly, as might be expected. Tomorrow, we do some serious boating, to Autherley Junction and on to the first set of SUCS moorings on the Shroppie. It'll be good to be back on that canal, one of our favourites -– it must be a year since we were last there.