Westport Park

Here I am Rune

Distance 8.1 miles

Total 1075 Locks 58 Tunnels

Running total mileage 1456.2miles

A fairly easy day of 6 locks and 8 miles of travel so 14 ‘lock miles’, this has brought us, as planned, to Westport Park, and a very pleasant mooring it is. No real issues today other than the pound between Stoke top lock and the one below being very short and therefore difficult to keep supplied with water. Once you’ve filled the lower lock you then have to drain the upper lock to refill the pound to get across it. The top lock is also of quite considerable depth, couldn’t see a measurement on it but I’d estimate that it was about 12 feet deep, which is enough for it to hurt of one fell off the lock ladder!

Following advice received on this blog (thanks to Diane and Ray!) I also stopped off to get a new gas bottle at the bargain price of £19.43 for a 13Kg propane bottle, which is about £6 cheaper than many of the chandlers we have passed. That should keep us supplied for another couple of months.

Tomorrow it will be through the Harecastle Tunnel and then we start to descend towards Wheelock, haven’t yet decided how far we are going to travel but the weather forecast looks quite good (seems a shame that half an hour of the day will be in the darkness of the tunnel).