Leigh

Here I am Rune

Distance  17.3 miles

Total 3590 Locks  223 Tunnels

Running total mileage 5245.4 miles

A good day’s run today taking us over 17 miles towards our destination. The weather held up OK and even had the decency to only rain whilst we were stopped for lunch at Worsley. In terms of incidents during the day, we assisted a boater to recover their boat that had broken free from its moorings at Sale Boat Club and narrowly missed a head on collision in Eccles.

The drifting boat was easily dealt with by just pushing the stern back towards the bank where the owner was standing, but the narrow miss was a bit more concerning. It was on a blind bend just beyond Patricroft Bridge and fortunately both myself and the other boater did exactly the right thing to avoid colliding. The tendency when meeting under those circumstances is to put the boat into reverse to try to stop, but we were beyond that point and had either or us done so we would have collided. What we actually did was concentrated on getting the bows past one another and then turn sharply to make the stern swing away from the other boat, and it worked perfectly, we didn’t touch at all.

Tomorrow the target will be to get to Wigan.