A bit of boating, and a BW puzzle

25th, 26th & 27th February

The very slow improvement in the weather has continued, more or less. At least we’ve not seen any more ice on the cut, and can begin to believe that we can stop worrying about it. Thursday morning was mild and damp; having gone to bed very early indeed the night before, we woke equally early in the morning.

We had decided to go to Marple for the day, but waited until half eight before setting off. This worked, in that when we got to Marple there was a space on the moorings between the two bridges. This was just as well, as the ones they’ve been working on since before Christmas are still not finished:




What is more, the contractors had left a workboat tied on half of the service block mooring, so we couldn’t have got in there if we had wanted to:



I know the weather has resulted in a lot of maintenance work being delayed, but it really shouldn’t take that long to do this job. BW are notorious for overestimating the cost of volunteer assisted restoration, and this sort of thing explains why. Discussing it with Elanor, we agreed that wrg would probably schedule about three weeks for this job. It entailed dredging out 100 metres of broken down washwall, driving Armco piling along the line, suitably back tied, and then backfilling with concrete. This is the stage they have reached after most of three months: finishing the job with stone coping is yet to be done.

The pictures were taken early on Thursday afternoon, and there was absolutely no sign of any work going on.

Having had a good shop in Marple we boated back to the Higher Poynton water point and filled the tank. We had a quick chat with Peter, and collected some post. This was a mixed bag: the mosquito netting, the butterfly folding draining rack and an unexpected letter. This last proved to be a really nice letter from a couple who have taken up boating after we had shown them round Sanity at Crick Show some years ago.

It is always really nice to hear from folk in this way, and even nicer if we can actually meet them.

It rained hard overnight and on Friday morning, so the set of pictures showing the floor being laid in Sanity Again shows some distinct wet boot prints on the protective cardboard. I’ve described progress with the new boat on the other blog as usual.

In the afternoon, Elanor turned up for an overnight stay and to bring some post. We took advantage of her presence to get a lift to IKEA, where we bought some new crockery for Sanity Again. It was an interesting trip through Hazel Grove and round the outskirts of Stockport as the IKEA is at Ashton under Lyne; we were very grateful that Elanor’s satnav found some short cuts through the traffic.

Arriving back at the boat, we all felt too tired to start cooking, which was a good excuse for a meal at the Boar’s Head and a pleasant family evening.

This morning it was damp and cold; Sheila and I composed the blog entry for Building Sanity Again whilst Elanor got going. We also heard some sad news that Allen Matthews, the founder of Ownerships, has passed away. We knew he was seriously ill with cancer, so this did not come as a complete surprise, but it is still a tragic loss of a man who changed the face of boat ownership in the UK.

One of the items of post that Elanor brought was a package from BW containing the licence plates for Sanity Again. We were both surprised and disappointed to find that the number allocated was 517491, since we had been expecting a number just short of 519000. As I understand it, numbers are allocated in order of date of registration, so getting this rather low number is like buying a new car now and being issued with a 2009 registration number.

We did some checking on the net; Jim Shead’s site indicates that the number is already in use, having been allocated last May, and entering it into the BW licence check page shows that there is a boat with this number with a current licence.

Under the circumstances, I suppose we could just not bother to buy a licence, since BW thinks we already have one. Instead, I have a phone call to the BW licence office to look forward to on Monday morning.

After Elanor had gone, and we had had some lunch, we pulled Sanity off her mooring and boated down to the water point, filled the tank, winded and then got a pump out and diesel from the Trading Post. The wind of course came up whilst we were doing this, which made for some tricky manoeuvring, but we coped with the aid of our 14 foot ash bow thruster.