Lydiate

Here I am Rune

Distance  16.3 miles

Total 3610 Locks  229 Tunnels

Running total mileage 5305.5 miles

Our stay in Liverpool is now over and we are back on the move, travelling a bit further than I was originally anticipating. My rough calculation would have got us to bridge 10 by about 2.30pm, particularly as we were already behind time on my estimation when we got to Litherland. A quick trip to the supermarket and the sanitary station and we were on our way again, behind another boat travelling out of Liverpool. They did however have a ‘different’ way of doing the swing bridges that I haven’t come across before.

 The usual practice if for the lead boat to swing the bridge and then stop to pick up the crew (bridge operator) whilst the second boat comes past and repeats the process at the next swing bridge (there are a lot of swing bridges on this section). You are effectively ‘leap-frogging’ each other but on this occasion the lead boat dropped off the bridge operator who opened the bridge to allow the boats through then slowed down to wait for him to catch up without allowing any of the boats behind to pass. Fine by me since it meant that we didn’t have to do anything other than steer the boat, but it meant that they did all of the work.

Since the lead boat was also travelling faster than I would have chosen to do, I took the opportunity to run the engine faster (2000rpm+) to make sure it would cope with the requirements of the Ribble link, it got a little bit warmer than at my normal speed (1600rpm) but seemed to cope OK with it.

Tomorrow we need to go through Bridge 20 since it is only open at midday and then closed again until Friday, after that we have some time to kill since we don’t do the Ribble Link until Saturday and it is only 15 miles away (that would work out at 3 miles a day, a bit lightweight really).