Storwood

Here I am Rune

Distance 14.5 miles

Total 2802 Locks  130 Tunnels

Running total mileage 3933.4 miles 

I think that the recurrent theme for today is ‘weed’! We seem to have been through every sort of water weed today which has slowed our pace to slightly less than an arthritic snail. It all started quite well as we left Barmby Tidal Barrage at about 10.15am and travelled quite well up the River Derwent as far as Cottingwith lock, which is just over 11 miles. This took about 3 hours, which is pretty much as expected against a slight river flow. Once onto the Pocklington Canal however, things slowed to a crawl, we have done an additional 3.5 miles since we stopped for lunch at Cottingwith and this has taken us nearly 4 hours! The average moving speed has been about 1.3mph but there is the addition of a couple of locks and swing bridges. The intention was to get to Melbourne tonight where there are moorings and a sanitary station, we are about 1.8miles short of that due to the slow progress and we gave up at Gardham Lock and are now spending the night on the lock moorings (not much traffic here so I don’t suppose we’ll inconvenience anyone.

The state of the weed on the Pocklington Canal (yes folks, that is a canal, not a ditch!)

I have to say that this is probably one of the most isolated pieces of canal that we've been on, even if you zoom out in the Google map link there is still nothing anywhere around here.

 

This slow progress has thrown a bit of doubt into our return journey since we told the Lock-keeper at Barmby that we’d probably be going back to Selby on Monday’s tide, it is quite likely that we may not get back to Barmby until Monday night, needing us to take Tuesday’s tide. We’ll have to see how things go tomorrow.