Reedley

Here I am Rune

Distance 13.3 miles

Total 1230 Locks 69 Tunnels

Running total mileage 1744.4miles

We pretty much got as far as I’d intended today since we have reached Reedley we’re just a couple of bridges short of where I was aiming at, not far enough to bother about. The main achievement of the day was the fact that we've now passed the halfway mark of the canal near a village called Church.

The sign for the village of Church (map of the canal in the background)

The 'halfway stone'.

 The highpoint of the day however would undoubtedly be the passage through Gannow Tunnel which could be generally described as a bit of a clusterf*ck! The approach to the tunnel is from under the M65 motorway so it is a bit noisy to start with. As I approached the tunnel to prepare to enter I slowed the boat right down since there is no view into the tunnel until you have pretty much committed to going in. The reason for this is because it is a sharp left hand turn into the tunnel. At that point I was thinking ‘This could get interesting if anything is coming the other way’. The first of the problems was trying to read the instruction board on the approach since I wasn’t sure whether it was one way or two way working. I don’t know if it says whether it is on the board but if it does I didn’t get to that bit. When about two boat lengths from the tunnel entrance I sounded the horn to try to scope out whether there was anyone coming out, sure enough my horn signal was immediately replied to by another boat still in the tunnel. Since it wasn’t possible to see how far in the tunnel he was or if there would be space to pass, the only option was to put the boat into hard astern to stop. There is a lot of crud in this canal and the effect of that was to draw a load of it onto the propeller so now we have lost a lot of propulsion because of the crap on the prop. The next hiccup was that the stern of the boat moved across to the right and immediately ran ground since there isn’t much depth of water there. So while trying to clear the prop I’m also trying to re-float it. Succeeded in doing that before the oncoming boat emerged from the tunnel and was then reversing towards a set of steps on the canal bank with the intention of stepping ashore and pulling the boat out of the way of the oncoming boat. Again not a good move since we ran aground again about 8 feet from the bank. By now the oncoming boat is almost up to my bows which makes re-floating a  bit more difficult since I’d gone aground in reverse and would need to go forwards to re-float it. With a lot of pushing and heaving with the bargepole we eventually managed to re-float and pass the oncoming boat and get into the tunnel. Once in the tunnel everything was fine since it was a wide tunnel and passing would have been possible. I think what needs to be done is for a bit of dredging work around the tunnel entrance to make such manoeuvres a bit easier!

Tomorrow, weather permitting, I would hope to be above Barrowford Locks and ready to go into Foulridge on Thursday.