Nantwich

Here I am Rune

Distance 3.3 miles 

Total 4546 Locks  288 Tunnels

Running total mileage 6,821.5 miles

We called it a day at Nantwich since there was some stuff we needed to get from the town. The trip went pretty well, we waited for the early heavy rain to pass over before setting off then headed off down the Hurleston Flight. It is easy to see why there are often hold-ups there, probably down to a bit too much enthusiasm from some crews. The flight works perfectly well if everyone paces themselves down it, but there are crews who are a bit too keen. We got to the top lock and saw that there was one boat on it’s way down and had gone into the pound below the lock. This would be normal practice on a section of canal with reasonably long pounds, the pounds at Hurleston aren’t. Our decision was to wait a) for the boat that was coming up and b) for the boat in the pound below to get into the next lock. Once that was done it was then just a case of empty our lock and then wait in the lock until the next lock was ready. The boat behind was seemingly quite keen to get into the lock I was in and a crew member came up, told me not to worry about shutting the bottom gates, and wanted me to move on down. I explained that the last thing you want on this flight was to have two boats going in the same direction, in the same pound. What happens is that the first boat fills the lock goes into it and once they’ve gone down the second boat has to do the same, but now there isn’t as much water in the pound and often you then cannot get over the cill into the lock after you’ve taken two lockfulls of water out of the same pound. This then means that someone has to run some more water down from the top into the pound so that you can get out of it (as was the case when we came up). I’m not sure that the crew member was quite following what I was saying, but it mattered not since I was in the lock and they weren’t and I wasn’t going anywhere until the next lock was ready.

At least on this occasion we got down the flight without anyone running out of water and got to Nantwich about 12.30pm. I was grateful to find an easy mooring on the embankment and here we have remained for the night. Tomorrow I hope to at least get into the Audlem flight since if we don’t, getting back to the basin by next weekend will become a very long shot.