Tixall

Here I am Rune

Distance 9.3 miles 

Total 4635 Locks  312 Tunnels

Running total mileage 6,774.6 miles

Stopped off at the Penkridge Sanitary Station to do all of the domestic stuff and then pressed on quite well today to the edge of Tixall Wide, further than I was expecting to get. There were certainly more boats about today, the boat in front of us at the Sanitary Station said he’d been waiting an hour to get on it, fortunately our wait was a lot less than that.

Along the greater number of boats, there seems to be a greater number of numpties steering them unfortunately. It was quite windy today so I’ll make some allowance for mistakes cause by that. A notable example being a hire boat we met just beyond Radford Bridge. It was a bit crowded there with moored boats but as we were approaching him I could see that he was going to hit a moored boat. He didn’t do much to avoid what was only a slight knock but my concern was that he may rebound off the moored boat into my path, fortunately he didn’t so it was a bit of a non-event (other than for the people in the boat that he hit who didn’t look too happy)

A far more annoying incident was approaching Tixall Lock, firstly a boat came around the corner on the side of the canal that I should have been occupying, seeing that he was having difficulty with the wind, I moved to the left so we’d pass on the ‘wrong’ side, all passed OK but as I’m getting back to ‘my’ side of the canal another boat comes around the corner once again on the ‘wrong’ side. Because I’m now across the canal heading back to the right side, any effort by me to try to go back to the ‘wrong’ side will lead to a head-on collision so the only option was to put the boat in full astern to try to stop. All fine, shame the idiot in the other boat, who was the one on the wrong side of the canal anyway, didn’t do the same. I managed to bring our boat to a halt and was about to start going backwards when the boat coming from the other direction, who was still in forward drive, hit me making no effort to either slow down or avoid the collision. As it turned out she came off worse as she went across the canal into trees and was scraping her way through them to get going again. All I suffered was a ‘battle scar’ of some scratched paint, the annoying part was that it was all so unnecessary.

Tomorrow we hope to get moored on ‘the Wide’ hopefully for the weekend.