Wednesday 4th May
Only a short hop today, 6 miles from Adlington to the top of Wigan locks. The delights of these 23 locks await us on Friday! First stop today was the chandlery at White Bear Marina in Adlington, which was shut yesterday. After this, the next stop was about 100 yards along the canal as we had something wrapped round our prop. This turned out to be plastic bags including, rather disgustingly, a bag of dog poo! It’s getting us when we aren’t even on the bank now!
No further problems befell us and we arrived at the top of the locks here before lunch. We were surprised to find there aren’t many moorings here, in fact there are only the 2 we’re currently occupying, 2 for the water point and another couple across the other side, occupied by a pair of anglers! Further back behind us is a moored boat but the shelf is so bad he’s about 2 ft away from the bank so where we are is really the only decent place to moor!
As Peter is coming tomorrow and he needs somewhere to park his car we quickly investigated the Kirkless Hall Inn which is nearby. It didn’t open until 2pm so we had to go back later. There was a certain amount of brattage there when we returned with what appeared to be the local mother and baby club making rather a racket!
Apart from that it’s not a bad pub, except for the strange tasting Jenning’s Bitter (run out of Guinness and Kronenburgh) and the ladies’ loos did smell rather badly of cat wee! However, the landlord was happy for Peter to leave his car there so we will have to frequent it again tomorrow.
We sat outside by the locks and met a lovely local couple who told us a lot about the area, including the fact that it is quite safe here, which was good to know. You’re never really sure what places are going to be like when you moor up there, so it’s nice to meet someone who can tell you a bit about it.
Meanwhile B and B were being very energetic and were walking to the bottom of the locks and back! On the way down they saw a couple in a widebeam who had got stuck on the sill in the lock and broken their skeg. The skeg, in layman’s terms, for all you laymen reading this, is the thing which protects the prop. Suffice to say damaging it is bad news. They had to be extracted from the lock by a couple of BW chaps and will need major repairs in a dry dock before they can continue.
On our way back from the pub we met the lock keeper. As we are on 24 hour moorings but want to stay 2 nights we thought we’d better ask if this was ok. He said no problem, as there aren’t many boats around at the moment and if any one said anything to just say we’d only just got here!
We rounded the corner to the moorings to find another 4 boats had arrived and were squeezed in every where, even on the water point. It is so unusual lately to see another single boat, let alone 4, it’s been so quiet. It will come as a shock to go back on the Shroppie or the T and M.
