The ice has gone at last

21st, 22nd & 23rd January

As I said yesterday, in future I’m going to do a post covering three days every Saturday, so that I never have to do two posts on Fridays.

Thursday was a very busy day; in the morning we walked down to Poynton for some shopping and finished just too late to catch the bus back. Rather than hang about for an hour, we walked back, which was hard work after all these weeks of taking the bus. The strategy of shopping with Ocado once a week means that we don’t have so much weight to carry, but it was still a bit of a slog coming up the hill.

We called in at the boat yard, as Peter had rung and asked us to move Skye out of the yard to her new mooring here at Marineville. We collected a bit of post and agreed to come back after lunch to move the boat; there was still enough ice about that not all the pontoons were available, so we needed to see where we could moor Skye.

After lunch, we went and got her; it was very pleasant to be steering a boat again.

In the evening, I cooked a chicken curry from a recipe in the curry cookbook which Sheila gave me for Christmas. It’s one of these books of more authentic Indian cuisine, and the result was indeed much lighter and less greasy than the typical British interpretation.

Yesterday morning saw us reviewing progress on Sanity Again as described over on the other blog. In the afternoon, we extracted Sanity from the mud which had collected around her in the nearly four weeks since she last moved, and boated in heavy rain down to the Trading Post for a lot of diesel.

Having filled up, we went on to the water point and filled that tank and then, rather than reverse, I had the pleasure of boating through the Deeps to the winding hole and so back to her mooring.

Having caught up with the Building Sanity Again blog, uploaded some pictures to Flickr and brought the fuel records up to date, we quietly collapsed for the evening.

The weather has been much quieter today, if rather foggy. I walked down the hill to get a newspaper in the morning and on my return had a chat with Martin off Skye who says that he and Denise are content with the mooring we have given them for the moment; they’ll have a choice of some others later in the year when the Brycelands have refurbished some more pontoons.

After a relaxed lunch, we took a short walk up and down the moorings to check that all was well now that the ice has gone, and then crossed the canal to the towpath for a bit of a stroll. Back at the boat, we watched the second episode of The Colour of Magic before wrestling with this week’s jumbo general knowledge crossword in The Independent.