First day boating again

29th April

There's post by Sheila just below this one, giving an account of our break in the Lakes, which was indeed extremely enjoyable. I can heartily recommend the Burn How Hotel in Bowness on Windermere.

Nonetheless, as Simon and Garfunkel said in 1970, "Gee but it's great to be back home" (I'll come back to the question of keeping your customers satisfied later).

After a good night's kip last night on our lovely, memory foam toppered bed, we made an early start to day. With her bottom free of weed, Sanity fairly zoomed along even in tick over, getting up to 2.5 mph at 850 rpm on the long straight stretch of the Cannock Extension.

I managed the turn onto the Wyrley and Essington without too much hassle. Apparently BW have spent £500,000 dredging the Curly Wyrley in the last couple of years, and it certainly shows. It used to be notorious for shallows and problems with strange objects underwater. Now it's nothing like as bad, though there are still the odd heart stopping rending noises from underneath in some of the bridge holes.

By just after nine we'd arrived at the service block and moorings at Brownhills. There were a couple of Anglo Welsh boats in possession of the services, so we tied a bit further on. We walked back to have a natter with a woman living on a boat in the arm alongside the services, and she confirmed that these are reasonably safe moorings, especially if you pull back onto the services (which are behind a BW locked gate) for the night.

We did a mega shop at Tesco, restocking the fridge and the veg drawer. Must say, after we washed the fridge yesterday before restarting it, it made me think that these self defrosting fridges are all very well, but they don't encourage you to keep them clean. With the old ones, you had to switch them off and clean them from time to time, or else you just couldn't get anything else in past the inches thick layer of frost.

It's a 24 hour Tesco here, but not very big. We got all the needful stuff, but I'm glad that we'll be passing the canal side one at Leamington Spa within the week, to pick up some of the more exotic stuff. We also made a couple of trips to the Wilko's that's here – this demonstrated that it's worth walking past the Tesco onto the main street, which has a range of other shops like a butchers and a bakers.

Finally, some thoughts about Canal Transport Services and Matt Cooper. Let me say straight away that he's a nice guy, aiming to be helpful, and seems to have done a good job of the grit blast and two pack blacking. He's used some stuff called Manor Coatings Promastic 600 CT, which from the descriptions on the website sounds like just the job. It can even be over coated with undercoat and gloss, for example around the tunnel bands.

The problem we had with him was the classic one about timing. I mean I know that Arthur Ransome said that the only boat builder ever to finish the job on time was Noah, who had a special incentive, but in fact some builders (Braidbar, especially now, and Stone Canal Cruising) do manage to keep to schedule.

With Matt, we'd said that we needed the job done in a window between mid April and mid May, because of our other commitments, and he'd made a provisional date for the week beginning 14 April. He then phoned at the start of April to confirm that, and we started looking at hotels for that week. The very afternoon when we'd decided on the Burn How, and were about to book and pay, he rang again to say his work had slipped back because of problems with the one he had on the dock at the time, and could he put us back by a week.

That was fine, in fact, as it got us out of the expensive and busy Easter week, so we booked for the week after. We actually arrived at CTS on the Friday before, after deciding not to do two nights at Anglesey Basin, and Matt then told us that Sanity would now be going on the dock on the Wednesday, but that that would still mean that she'd be all done by the beginning of the next week.

Off we went on holiday, and as I said, had a great time. The only thing was, it was a bit like having your car in for its MoT. You know how you spend the day anxiously eyeing the phone, waiting for the call from the garage with those dread words "I'm afraid we've had a bit of a problem, squire"?

Well this was like that, only it went on all week. In the event, we had a call on Thursday evening: could we put off coming back until Wednesday? Well, no. All right then, how about Tuesday, which I said we could probably cope with. Because things were reasonably quiet in the Burn How during the week, they were able to let us stay on another night, at the price we had paid via Lastminute.com (£114 per night).

When we got back, Sanity was indeed ready. Matt didn't seem to sense that he'd risked seriously inconveniencing us, and that it could have been a real problem. We won't be going back there, partly because of that, and partly because, compared to a lot of other yards around the system, it's just too much hassle getting up here.

If you are a leisure boater, and can give him a four week window during which you leave the boat there to be worked on as and when, I'm sure he's fine, but if you are a liveaboard, and have to make arrangements for somewhere to live whilst the work is done, you need to use a more reliable yard, I reckon.

Heigh ho, enough said. Tomorrow we press on to Longwood, probably stopping at Aldridge Marina for a service, then the day after it will be the long slog from there to Catherine de Barnes and away out of the BCN.