Another weekend on Tixall Wide

21st & 22nd March

Yesterday was another great Spring day, frosty at first but warming up quite quickly. We had a relaxed start, with not a lot of boating to do, and had an easy chug to Great Haywood.

We stopped on the water point to top up, so as to be able to do two washloads over the weekend. Whilst Sheila superintended this, I popped along to the village for a paper and some milk.

Then it was round the familiar pound to Tixall, thereby completing a circumnavigation of the Four Counties Ring. Later on, I looked up the blog to see when we'd left, and found that it was exactly a month ago. That month being February, in future if anyone asks how long it takes to do the Four Counties, our answer will be "four weeks".

Tixall was quite busy, with a lot of "basic" liveaboards tied here and there on the towpath. A group of them seem to have moved from the vicinity of Rugeley while we were away.

After lunch, we made one more try to find the Essex on the Chase? geocache, and this time we were successful (yay!). We left the "Twigs the Giraffe" travel bug in there, and collected a Winnie TB instead. His wrapping says he wants to go to Australia, which is a bit of a cruise too far for Sanity, or even Sanity Again, but at least we can move him south a bit in the next couple of weeks.

After that it was a quiet afternoon and evening, filled with a sense of achievement. Today has been pretty chilled as well. I went to the village first thing, then we loafed in the boat, doing IT type stuff, Sheila proof reading as well as she could on a slowish connection, and me perusing the Independent on Sunday. We even did some filing.

After coffee I did the regular engine checks and washed the bike. Then I stood it enticingly on the stern, with a notice saying it was for sale. It seemed worth a punt, though there weren't many folks around.

Not long after lunch, the guy off the boat in front started trying to cut up some firewood with a small pruning saw.

It was quite a struggle for him, so we lent him our bow saw, for which he was pleasingly grateful. When he returned it with the bucket we'd also loaned him to rest the wood on whilst cutting it, he'd popped in some of the bits of wood he was cutting as a thank you.

Inspired by this, we set to ourselves and cut up a chunk of softwood three by two we'd found, and split it into kindling. Scarcely had we settled back into the boat than a passing bloke walking his dog knocked on the roof and asked about the bike. He was just starting his walk, but if we were staying put all day, he said he'd call back later. This he duly did, had a couple of rides on the beast and paid me for it, in cash, on the spot.

It's the fastest I've ever done a deal – looks like I'm better at selling second hand bikes than cars, at which I am frankly the worst ever.

So it's been a good weekend all round really. We spent a bit of time working out our timings for going to and from Norton Canes next month, as we want to tie the yard down to a date for putting Sanity on the dock that will still allow us time to get to Crick at the end of May.

This will involve us cruising some bits of the BCN that we've not done before, so I researched possible overnight moorings on the net. I found the page on the No Problem site, thanks, Sue, and also some stuff on the BCNS site.

Having done the planning, I also went to post to the canals-list to ask for any advice from there. This revealed that Yahoo! are having mega problems with the servers for Yahoo Groups. They are moving them to a new data centre, with the usual consequences.

It looks like it could be several days before stuff gets back to normal there, but there's not much to be done about it except curse and mutter. The Braidbar Owners group is also affected, so the email will be pretty quiet for a while.

Tomorrow, we'll go back to Great Haywood, get diesel and a pump out at Anglo Welsh and then set off for Alrewas. The forecast is for this fine spell to break, with a spell of wet and windy weather, but what can you expect at the end of March? It's going out like a lion, as it's supposed to.