Busily to Handsacre

As I said yesterday, we planned to wait a bit before setting off this morning so as to get to Rugeley when there would be some space. Accordingly we got away just before nine. I was feeling pretty bleary, frankly, having had a lousy night's sleep, so it was just as well that the route is not very challenging.

Typically, the boat which had been tied in front of us and which had set off before us had got one of the spaces just before the bridge, so it looks like we needn't have hung about. No matter, we had a useful couple of trips; one to the bank and assorted other shops in the centre and the other to Tesco.

We even found a replacement throw toy for Sally in a pet shop, a frisbee type thing. We thought about a large Kong, but had a feeling that either she already had one or else that it had been tried and found wanting.

As usual, Sheila started off steering whilst I put away. This proved a good move on my part; she had quite a bit of fun getting clear of the moored boats in the face of oncoming traffic; at one point going hard astern resulted in a horrendous clonking from the prop.

I had my share of this later, getting Sanity Again stemmed up on the offside at a subsequent bridgehole. After all this we had a decent run through to Handsacre, arriving just before half twelve.

I'd already scoffed my pasty, but ate the rest of my lunch whilst Sheila got hers. The tiller had been shaking quite a bit for the last section, raising the concern that either we had something on the prop or, worse, that our stemmings up had put a ding in one of the blades.

So down the weed hatch I went; all was well, I'm glad to say.

There was plenty of room at Handsacre and we've spent the afternoon quietly. There's always a decent 3 signal near Rugeley; handy as we've both upgraded the iPads to iOS 8. Two features of interest to us – the new way the keyboard handles predictive text, much more like the Android system, and Family Sharing which will let us read each other's iBooks for example.

Tomorrow, a solid day's boating to come. An early start and right through to Alrewas.