Heading back to Norbury in the wind

I really shouldn't have stretched that portion of beef curry with a can of red kidney beans the other night. ;)

The wind has made things a bit difficult today, and, what's worse, the forecast is for more of it in the next few days. This wouldn't normally be a problem, we'd just sit tight and wait for it to blow out, but we have to start making our way back to Norbury Junction for blacking next Wednesday.

First off, I steered along the Nantwich embankment (always a draughty place) and on to Henhull, where there's a decent 70' winding hole. It wasn't very well dredged, unfortunately, so it took a bit of persuasion to get round; every time I went astern to pull clear of the offside, the bow started swinging back the way we'd come. Eventually I got the bow through the wind, so that it started helping (this why it's called winding; in the horse drawn days, they'd put a scrap of sail up on the bow to work the boat round).

Then it was back to Nantwich and carry on to Hack Green. The whole evolution from setting off to getting back to where we'd moored on the southern end of the embankment took just 90 minutes. With the washing machine whirling away, we worked up the two locks at Hack Green, gave the Secret Nuclear Bunker a farewell wave and toddled on to Coole Pilate, where there's an excellent set of SUCS moorings, complete with picnic tables and barbecue stands.

Since then, the wind has got up even more. I just hope that it moderates a bit overnight, or the Audlem flight is going to be really interesting tomorrow.

One consequence of doing things this way is that I didn't get into Nantwich to buy a paper. But we have a decent internet connection here, so I bought a copy of the Kindle edition of the Independent instead. It has most of the articles and reviews, but very few of the pictures and no crosswords. At 99p instead of a £1 for the print edition, that's a touch steep; I won't take to reading it all the time like that. But it's something rather than nothing, and much easier to read on the Kindle than trying to read the web version on screen.