Wednesday 28th August
Today’s trip has been a bit hectic, probably because we didn’t get away early enough! Cathy texted at 7-45 am to say they were just leaving. I was still trying to get my eyes to open far enough to see to put the kettle on!
We left about an hour later to do the 8 mile 2 lock journey from Tixall to Armitage. This took 4.5 hours with a stop at Rugeley for shopping and a stop for water just before Armitage. The first thing we wanted to do was visit Anglo Welsh to get water and empty the loo. As we went through the bridge to the junction I could see it was a bit chaotic on the water point. There was one boat on the water point, one boat coming off, another coming through the bridge, we had a boat right behind us and there was one coming towards us from the right so we gave it a miss and went straight to Haywood Lock.
We carried on to Rugeley passing Ken and Carol who were polishing their boat at Taft Bridge. The downside of owning a boat cleaning products business, you have to keep polishing your boat! The canal was like the M6 today and Rugeley was busy. We were following 3 boats all of whom decided to moor up before Bridge 66 on the end of a line of moored boats. We feared the worst but found a mooring just through bridge 66, the most convenient one for visiting Morrison’s actually.
I made a start at Morrison’s while Ken went off to the fishing tackle shop for a replacement landing net. Last night when he was landing a particularly large bream there was a splash followed by an expletive and the fish had split the landing net and gone straight through it!
He soon joined me in Morrison’s after finding that the fishing tackle shop had closed down! We returned to the boat and carried on to the water point just before the Armitage tunnel. We were following a boat which had passed us at Rugeley and he pulled in to the water point. There was already a boat there so we had to breast up. Fortunately the boat that was already there had nearly finished and the one we were breasted up to didn’t want much so it was soon our turn.
We had to let the boat we were breasted up to out first. Ken and I got on the bank with our ropes and the chap started to move off. He had not one but two chimneys and one was quite high, I realised I wouldn’t be able to lift the rope high enough for him to get the chimneys under. He left his boat going in tick over and jumped onto ours, got our boat hook, leapt back on to his boat, then came and gave me the boat hook to hold the rope up with. I just about managed to get it up there before he went underneath!
While we were getting our water two more boats turned up and several more went past. Cathy had texted to say they were outside the Plum Pudding and there was a space in front of them so we were hoping that would still be the case when we got there. It was but the space was about 3 ft too short. However, the spaces further up, that used to be for BW maintenance boats only, now seem to be included in the visitor moorings so we got in there instead.
Unfortunately, because we are on the Plum Pudding moorings we had to go there for a drink. Obviously we were all really upset about that, especially when they did a nice pint of Bass for only £2-60 a pint! After a couple of pints Mick, who had spotted The Spode Cottage over the road, decided he wanted to have one in there as well. He and Ken left Cathy and I to finish our drinks (we didn’t want another one) and went across the road. About 2 minutes later they came back moaning that the beer was rubbish (they had a sample) and it was about 80p a pint more expensive than the Plum Pudding. Cathy and I were glad we hadn’t bothered to go over there.
Tomorrow we are going to Alrewas with (hopefully) a stop at Fradley to empty the loo we didn’t empty today!
