Tuesday 27th July
We have had quite an eventful day today one way or another. Firstly it has been raining for most of it, which is par for the course round here lately, but we set off for Kidsgrove anyway. We had gone about half a mile and were approaching bridge 74 when there was a huge bang closely followed by another one and the boat lurched alarmingly from side to side. I was inside at the time and initially thought Ken had misjudged the bridge and hit the side. I rushed out the back and he said we had hit something that was under the water. We supposed someone had thrown something fairly large off the bridge into the canal. I phoned BW to inform them because I didn’t want other people running into it as well and a chap called Terry said they would go down and have a look. Fortunately we didn’t damage our prop but a few things did fall off the shelves inside and the rest all slid forward! My tin cupboard was a shambles, all my nice neat stacks of tins had fallen over. There was a cascade of chopped tomatoes and tinned fruit when I opened the door later!
That excitement over we carried on and a little while later we saw Barry and Barbara’s boat coming towards us. I started waving like a mad thing and received no response from Barry on the back. As we got nearer I was still waving like a mental idiot, then I realised it wasn’t Barry and Barbara at all. We drew alongside this poor bemused chap who, seeing my frantic waving, thought he had been doing something wrong. ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I thought you were someone else.’ He said, ‘I am someone else.’ God we laughed.
When we reached the stop lock at Hall Green we had a bit of a lack of concentration incident. There was a boat about to go into the lock so we had to stop and wait. As we were going to stop I got off the front ready to operate the lock and Ken got off the back with the centre rope. Unfortunately, having put the boat in reverse to stop it he forgot to knock it into neutral before he got off. Consequently the boat began making it’s way back up the canal in the direction we had just come with both of us on the bank! By this time the back had swung out too far from the bank for Ken to get back on and he couldn’t pull it in on his own so I had to leap on the front, run through the boat, take over and bring it back to the bank. We won’t be doing that again ………. we hope.
When we got to Kidsgrove we were perturbed to find all the 48 hour moorings taken. We had to stop here to get our mail from the BW office at Red Bull, otherwise we may have carried on to the Harecastle Tunnel, although we didn’t want to do that today. We had to moor up just before the 48 hour moorings, near the aqueduct which goes over the road. We couldn’t get the back in properly again, the bank slopes down rather steeply and it is a bit noisy near the road but we didn’t have any choice as there aren’t any more moorings after this, not the way we are going anyway.
By this time it had stopped raining so we decided to take George to the BW office and then to The Red Bull. However, we just got to The Red Bull when it started drizzling again and in the absence of a covered smoking area, we sat under a tree! A couple (called Mike and Sue we found out later) who were coming up the Cheshire Locks saw us there and decided it would be a good idea for them to stop and have a pint too. We all left quite some time later! They have a fabulously unusual boat called ‘Belly Button’ and a dog called Spud!
It has finally stopped raining now and we are hoping for a nice day tomorrow when we tackle the Harecastle Tunnel again.
