Early to boat and early to rise...

21st & 22nd September

Our short week of serious boating continued with another early start yesterday. In fact, since it is the equinox and the sun rises at six o' clock GMT, that is seven o' clock BST, it could be said to have been a crack of dawn start since we were boating by that hour.

We made steady time to Stoke, and reached the bottom lock not long after eight. There was in fact very little traffic about until we reached the final two locks. After that there was an occasional boat coming the other way, but nothing at all unusual for the time of year.

We had twenty minutes to wait at Harecastle, and then went in as the third boat in a convoy of four, the last being a BW push tow who went very slowly. We were out of the northern portal after around forty minutes, by no means our fastest time through the tunnel, but perfectly reasonable under the circumstances. These included very low water levels, the summit pound being about six inches down.

This seemed to be deliberate, as the pounds below the summit had all been full and there was evidence of plenty of water coming down off the Caldon at Etruria. Although the low level meant little anxiety about the air draught in the tunnel it did make steering more problematic. I say this to excuse my erratic course at the start of the tunnel. Having thought that I had Sanity settled in her groove, I took my hand off the tiller to pull the slide over and reduce the dazzle from the engine room lights. Sanity immediately dived to starboard, and before I could recover her, her bow had cracked the tunnel wall a ringing blow. In course of straightening up, I then clipped the wall with the starboard quarter as well.

It's the biggest mess of steering through a tunnel I've made for quite some time.

Confirming my view that the low level of the T & M summit was deliberate, we locked up a good foot and a half at Hall Green, the largest drop I've seen on this stop lock in all the time we've been coming through it. There's been no lack of water on the Macclesfield on either the sump or summit pounds.

We found ourselves following an Anglo Welsh boat who was struggling with his steering even more than I was, so we stopped for lunch just by the Red Bull Aqueduct, and again for water above Hall Green.

Finally we took on diesel at Heritage, where they have a very efficient system for dealing with your declared diesel split; the pump shows the price per litre for every ten percent declared for propulsion, so that you are in no doubt how much you are paying.

We stopped finally on the visitor moorings beyond Ramsdell Hall. No sooner were we settled down than a knock on the roof announced the presence of Graham from Autumn Years, accompanied by his friend Robert who has hired Skye for three weeks. We had a good old natter with them before spending the rest of the afternoon quietly.

Today we had another crack of dawn start in much milder weather. Sheila steered through the succession of bridges which are such a feature of this canal. Indeed, they have three striking characteristics:

• They are extremely elegant being built of the local stone;
• They are quite narrow;
• There is an awful lot of them.

We made good time to the foot of Bosley, again with few boats around, although we saw more traffic once we'd started up the flight. We'd allowed two hours for the locks and planned to have lunch in the long pound just one lock down from the top. However, it was not long after eleven when we got there and so we carried on up and reversed onto the pump out wharf by the service block at the top.

As I've done before, I lifted the manhole cover outside the Elsan sluice so as to reduce the lift for the pump. Partly because of this and partly as a result of my servicing of the pump the other day, it pumped away as quickly as I've ever seen it. This was just as well, as the tank was very full.

Furthermore, just as we were pumping the last of the rinse water out, a BW official arrived and announced without preamble "You can't do that here, stop it." He told us that if we wanted a pump out we should buy a £10 pump out card and use BW's machine.

I've commented before on the irrationality of BW's attitude to self pump out, but I didn't engage this gentleman in debate. His brusque and abrasive manner indicated that lack of self confidence which is the hallmark of the bully, and there was no point in humiliating him by an exercise of intellectual debate to which he would not have been equal.

I confined myself to asking him for his name just as he began to strut back to his car. He told me that it was Terry Gale and that he was the Maintenance Supervisor for the canal. I took him at his word, though he made no attempt to produce identification, nor was he wearing name badge or uniform. He did note the details of the boat in his diary and said that Customer Services would be writing to me to confirm what he had told us.

Meantime and without demur we packed away the kit and in due course boated off.

We went just round the corner and stopped for lunch and then chugged on through the Royal Oak Swing Bridge and the little manual swing bridge, no 47, which for the first time ever was actually closed against us.

We've tied on the field mooring near Lyme Green, just a couple of bridges short of Gurnett Aqueduct. It's very pleasant here and the mooring is on Armco piling rather than the rather problematically spaced rings and wide concrete edge at Gurnett.