Merry Hill

Here I am Rune

Distance 0.7 miles

Total 874 Locks 40 Tunnels

Running total mileage 1262.1miles

Today was a day of fairly hard work if I may say so. Started off up the Delph flight (7 today plus the 1 we did yesterday) with the crew still suffering from a bad back so had to do all the locks myself. Once again luck was on our side since they were all in our favour so there was no preparing the locks before entering. Weather wasn’t too clever since it would best be described as ‘changeable’, and it was changing almost by the minute, sun followed by hail/sleet followed by rain followed by sun, no sooner did I put my raincoat on than the sun came out again and I would be sweating in it. 

We got to Merry Hill in time to collect the new washing machine from Argos but getting it back to the boat wasn’t exactly straightforward since the shop would only allow their sack-truck to be used in the car park. I had a contingency plan of using my cycle trailer to haul it up the hill to the boat, and this method worked quite well. We then needed to lift the washing machine onto the boat, again with the crew suffering from a bad back this became a one man operation but with astute use of the gangplank this was achieved. Machine is now all plumbed in and ready to go for its maiden wash tomorrow morning, if all goes well the old washing machine will be on its way to the recycling depot before lunch. In fact the old cycle trailer is in for a fair bit of use tomorrow since we are going to need to refill with water (about 250 litres I would guess) we have two elsan cassettes to empty and probably about 40kg of coal to go and get, and that doesn’t include carting the old washing machine off to the recycling depot, it’s going to be a busy day tomorrow.