Thursday 24 May 2018

It's Tixall again

It's about two and a half hours from Deptmore top to Tixall Wide, so we planned to leave at eight, thus arriving in time to shop for bread before lunch. In the event, we were ready a bit earlier than that, but had to wait just a little as an ex-Challenger boat came by just as we were getting ready to let go.

This was a judgement on me for saying airily to Sheila, when asked if she should go ahead and set the lock before I pushed off, "Oh, no, we'll hardly have to queue for the lock just now." As it turned out, her help wasn't optional anyway. I'd thought I was sorted and waved her off to the lock, then found I couldn't get Sanity Again unstuck from the towpath.

I should explain that the weather has been utterly different today, cool, cloudy and very gusty, with the gusts on the offside bow. Sheila had shoved the bow out and I the stern, as usual, but just as we started moving forward, the stern found a lump of silt off the towpath, the boat stopped and the bow blew back on. I had a couple of goes at reversing off, so that the prop wash blew down between the boat and the bank and shoved the stern into the middle, but, every time it happened as we turned to boat away (as the Tremoloes nearly sang), it was squidge onto the mud and swing back in.

So I called Sheila back and with her holding the bow out, finally managed to depart. By now the other boat was out of the lock and her lockwheeler kindly nipped back and lifted a top paddle for us.

After all that, things went pretty much to plan. Once past Stafford Boat Club, Sheila got the washing machine going again (there'll be a limit to how much washing she can do here at Tixall for four whole days, even starting with a full water tank) and we plodded our way round Stafford. It's much in need of dredging all along there. Any attempt to do more than about 3 mph just leads to a shaking tiller and churning mud.

It was jolly cold on the stern, too, but we made it in the expected time and by 10.15 we were looking for a mooring here. There are a lot more boats about now than when we came this way a few weeks ago. Radford Bank moorings were chock-a-block and although there were plenty of spaces here on the Wide, about half the towpath was occupied.

We're tied about halfway along, at a spot where the hedge isn't quite so high but is still sheltering us from the wind, so both the whirligig and the solar panel can do their stuff. It used to be that phone signals were poor to non-existent at this end of the Wide, but I've got good 4G here on both Vodafone and 3.

After a coffee, we walked to the junction and visited the Farm Shop to get the necessaries for lunch.

We've had a quiet afternoon watching the other boats go by and a friendly and polite fisherman trying to defend his stretch of towpath from marauding would-be moorers. He's managed so far, but I've warned him that the pressure on him will become quite intense tomorrow.



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