Steadily North

17th & 18th September

We are obviously winding down and relaxing after the excitements of the summer; we've both had a decent night's sleep for the last two nights, which has added to the pleasure of some steady but undemanding boating.

Yesterday we chugged through Handsacre and Armitage, past the delicious Spode Priory, to Rugeley. There was a moderate amount of traffic, but nothing like that reported further north in some other blogs. We did two shopping trips, either side of a cup of coffee.

The first took in W H Smith (ream of copier paper, newspaper), Wilkinson's (rubber doormat to form core of new side fender) and Morrison's (food shopping). The second concentrated on Morrison's. Where our first trip had focussed on healthy eating with items such as houmous and their gorgeous multigrain bread, the second redressed the balance with bottles of wine and similar.

By the time we were back on the boat for the second time, it was half an hour short of lunch time. We therefore pottered about putting stuff away until it was nearly time to eat, and then we ate.

Then it was off again. We'd postponed a decision about exactly how far to go each day when planning this final cruise of the year, but since the going was good we kept going as far as Wolseley Bridge. I'm glad we did so, as in the early evening we had a knock on the roof and there were Andy and Lyra of Lyra's Adventures.

We had a nice chat, only disturbed by odd noises from the towpath. Andy had insisted on leaving Lyra outside, saying that she was muddy, though she looked remarkably clean to me. Lyra had got a bit bored with waiting and was conducting an investigation of the construction of the rammed gravel of the towpath by digging a hole in it.

Fortunately, being a softish material, it went back quite easily and it was soon hard to tell where she had been working.

Andy had reassured us about levels of traffic, so we postponed our departure this morning until seven o'clock. Nonetheless, even at that time we soon found boats coming towards us. There were no delays at either Colwich or Haywood, though, and by half eight we were on the Great Haywood water point topping up the tank.

This did allow some boats to pass us and there was a queue of three at Hoo Mill when we got there. The spacing of locks on this section from Great Haywood to Barlaston means that once you've queued for one lock the boats tend to stay spaced out, so that as long as you don't thrash along too quickly you seldom have to wait very long below each of the subsequent locks.

That's how it worked out today; there would often be one or two boats waiting above each lock but we were delayed very little. We'd planned to stop at Salt, between Weston and Sandon, but since it was such good boating weather, calm and mild, we kept going and found a mooring new to us about half way between Sandon and Aston.

We've had a very pleasant afternoon here, with the weather improving all the time. I checked that the sludge pump was still working, since it's been out of use for a few months and we may well get a chance to use it shortly.

Apart from that, I've advertised Sanity for sale on the web site and to the canals list. By coincidence, there will be three secondhand Braidbars for sale at the Open Day a week on Saturday. The hire boat Skye, the show boat the year after Sanity, is on the market as Peter Mason is building a replacement for her this winter. And we've just heard that Essence, the show boat the year after Skye, is also up for sale.

So anyone coming to the Open Day can see the show boats from 2004, 2005, and 2006 and buy whichever of them takes their fancy.

Tomorrow we'll do another early start and hopefully get up the Stone locks before it gets too busy. We plan to moor above Newcastle Road, on the rings with their individual solar powered cat's-eyes, just to make a change from our usual mooring below the winding hole at the bottom of the flight.