Kathy and I arrived on Friday evening and got the boat loaded up and tried a couple of experiments with the new curtains.
On Saturday morning we got up and cast off and moved over to the waterpoint. The water point at Market Drayton is far from the fastest on the system and we ignored the 30 minutes maximum notices and filled up. If there had been others queuing up for water then we would have moved on but as there weren’t we didn’t.
Tyrley locks were quiet and I think we met one boat on the flight. When we were going through Tyrley Top Lock No 3 the dog belonging to the people who live in the lock keepers cottage thought about hopping on the boat but luckily she didn’t. According to a person on the lock side who moors on the moorings above the locks he once got to The Anchor (at Anchor Bridge No 42 ) and found the dog on his boat and had to make a phone call to let them know that their dog wasn’t missing.
The big cutting above the locks was strangely barren with not a lot of greenery in it. There were a few boats moving, and we met a small convoy of them as we approached Knighton Wharf but it soon went quiet again and I think we saw maybe two more boats before we arrived at Norbury Junction where we got a pump out, a new bottle of Calor and some diesel.
This was the first time we’d bought fuel under the tax regime and we bought about 74 litres at 48.9 per litre. We went for a 60/40 split between propulsion/generation so I’m not really sure how much per litre we actually paid in the end. I think there is a need for a “real” price per litre calculator or cribsheet.
We pulled over onto the visitor moorings for lunch before continuing south. We’d no definite plans on where to turn, we were just going to turn round at a sensible time for us to get back to the mooring sometime early on Sunday afternoon.
The wonderful spring weekend really hadn’t materialised and it got mistier and colder and windier and we decided to turn at the winding hole at High Onn Bridge No 25. The winding hole is a “private” on where turning is by permission of the land owner. But the land owner thinks that actually winding holes are good places to moor boats and its a bit silted up too, so I’d not really recommend it as a normal place to turn.
By now the weather was getting pretty grim and we moored up for the night on the moorings in the cutting just north of Gnosall Railway Bridge and we put up the new curtain rails and hung the new curtains and settled down for the night.