Out and about in the sun

4th, 5th & 6th February

We’ve been taking advantage of a spell of milder weather, especially as it looks as if we are going to have another period of frost and ice.

On Thursday, I went and got a paper from the nearest newsagent, and we spent a bit of time sawing up the pallet we fished out of the cut the other day. We also took delivery of another ten 25 kg bags of mixed ovoids from Stuart Hooper. We had a discussion with him about some hooks for the end of short shafts he has for sale. Unfortunately, because they are hand forged, they are very expensive at £25 a piece, and he admits that he has had a shaft fitted with one stolen from his boat.

The equivalent from Midland Chandlers is around £10 and I suspect we will be satisfied with the rather inferior product on this occasion.

In the afternoon, we took a short walk along the towpath to Bridge 16, down to the Middlewood Way and so back to the moorings. On the way, we noticed that Otter, a GRP cruiser, has sunk on her moorings just a few pontoons along from us. On our return to the boat, I emailed the Brycelands so that they could alert the owner, but it turned out they already knew about it.

Yesterday, we did our regular review of progress on Sanity Again as described on the other blog. She is coming on well, and the exciting news is that she is going to be the Braidbar show boat at the Crick Show this year. There will be an appointment system for viewing her, and when the details of that have been finalised I’ll take care to post them on both blogs.

Since the bitterly cold wind had died away, we had a longer walk in the afternoon up into Lyme Park where we could see the progress they’ve made with some dry stone wall repairs despite the ferocious weather. The ground is still very boggy, even on well made tracks, and one result of this exercise was to reinforce my determination to get a new pair of boots, since my old pair are now leaking really badly.

This gave us the excuse to do some boating today, when we took Sanity to Marple for the first time this year. Although it hadn’t felt that cold overnight, there was just a bit of cat ice here and there on the water. Sheila was a bit anxious about this, but it never got worse than a few millimetres thick and had no effect on our blacking.

In Marple we were able to find almost everything we were looking for, including a nice new pair of boots. They are HiTec again, but with a much more solid sole and a heavier full grain leather upper. I just hope they last better than the last pair, though it must be admitted that our lifestyle can be very hard on the footwear.

They have not finished working on the towpath moorings in Marple, so again we had to reverse onto a mooring on the Upper Peak Forest, but in a flat calm this manoeuvre went remarkably smoothly this time.

After lunch, we boated back to Higher Poynton; the ice had entirely disappeared. We filled the diesel tank at the Trading Post and then went onto the water point. Having winded at the far end of the Deeps, we reversed into our mooring so that if we get frozen in here again, we can pump out the toilet tank.

The forecast for the next couple of weeks is for -4 or -5 ºC, although daytime temperatures will be mostly positive. Time will tell if this means more enduring ice on the cut; this is proving to be a very long winter.