Monday 18th April
Yesterday we stayed at Gargrave, walking into the village with George. It was not as far by the road coming back as it had been by the towpath going, which George was grateful for as it had got out quite hot! Gargrave is a fair sized village with a Coop, tea rooms, pubs etc. It also has a flight of locks through it so it is very popular with gongoozlers. We have started to notice more boats on the move now, especially since we passed a couple of hire companies at Silsden and Skipton.
Today we have taken nearly all day to travel 3.5 miles! The first obstacle we encountered was a BW barge across the canal at the top of the first lock. The mooring pins had come out of the front and it had drifted across. Ken and Barry had to tie it to the fence.
There were 12 locks to do and quite hard ones too! Most of them had these really strange ground paddle levers (see photo) and we could never get both of them to work! The gates were heavy, the chambers were fairly slow filling, leaking as well and we had a lock pinched by a couple of hire boats, bless!
While we were doing these locks Barbara and I had to fortify ourselves with some jam donuts, yum! We eventually moored up in this fabulous spot about 3pm. We could have done with a pint but as we would have had to walk about 1.5 miles to the Cross Keys at East Marton we all had a cup of tea instead and some of us had another donut!
We will probably stay here for a couple of days now as it is so beautiful. The plan is to then go to Barnoldswick (pronounced Barlick) get diesel, more coal, do sanitary things then come back up here for Easter. Can’t think of a better plan at the moment.
