We had a pleasant evening meal in the Boat last night. Dave Miller had described it as "OK" and that was a fair judgement. The beer was very good, the state of the decoration is clean but basic and the menu very short but all home cooked. It was burger night, two for £13, so Sheila had the pulled jerk chicken and I had a "Kiwi burger".
This latter proved to be a fairly normal beef burger of good quality but with a fried egg added. I'd thought it was the Aussies who went in for steak and eggs, but there you are.
On the way back to the boat, we thought that it was a little odd that the Filance lock was still mostly full despite the leaking bottom gates, but the top paddles looked OK – at least the nearside one was fully down and Sheila wasn't keen on me crossing the top gate for a close look at the offside one after a couple of pints of Timmy Taylor's Landlord, so we left it.
This was a mistake.
After a rather broken night (mainly down to too much salt on the fries, I reckon) I got up at six to make some tea and found the boat well heeled over. After making the tea, I slipped some clothes on and checked the situation out. The bow was still floating but the stern was aground. I walked down to the lock with a windlass and, sure enough, the offside paddle was up just a few clicks. The pound was now down about 18", so we got dressed and decided to eat breakfast on the water point.
So there we were at seven, shoving away at Sanity Again who fortunately was not too hard aground on the silt to be immoveable, eventually. Once she was floating again, Sheila started up and boated down to the lock. Having closed the paddle properly before, the lock had now drained out which shows how bad the leak was on the bottom gates. Indeed, it's quite a long pound from Filance up to Otherton so 18" represents a lot of water gone to waste.
After that, things were reasonably straightforward. It's a good pressure at Penkridge services, so we just had time to eat breakfast whilst we took on half a tank (about 380 litres) of water.
On we went, plenty of water down here, of course, arriving at Park Gate at half eight. I wanted to get a couple of spare rubber bump stops for the stern doors, so we tied above the lock and Sheila got the washing machine going. At nine, Midland Chandlers opened and I walked in to find Paul from the Mercia branch there – the MC staff are shuffled about this week because of Crick Show.
Purchases made, we had a pleasant run through Acton Trussell to our usual mooring above Deptmore lock. It's very sunny today but quite breezy. An extra advantage of the fly screens is that the mesh moderates the draught, so we've got one side hatch open and screened and it's just pleasantly cool in here.
Tomorrow, on down the lock and round Stafford to Tixall for the weekend. We won't be leaving there until Tuesday now as we are entertaining Richard Parry for a day's boating from Great Haywood to Stone that day. Hopefully, he'll see it as a holiday after his exertions at Crick.
Should I mention the new logo?
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