At day's end, I tied up the boat near a Canal & River Trust service shack: water, elsan, toilets and shower.
A shower! 🚿
I hurried from the boat to the CRT building in only my shorts, T-shirt and shoes, towel and soap in hand. (These places lack clothes hooks, so fewer items is better.) They did have a wooden bench, and a disabled grab handle that I used as a towel rack.
The locks toward Haigh Hall are deep. Their massive gates weigh more than a tonne each. A number of the gates have chains and pulleys to help boaters open and close them.
To share the work, I asked another boat to pair up.
Quite a few of the #locks are covered in a lush, living carpet of #vegetation (see photo).
Going through a flight of double locks, traditionally boats would be tied together to move more easily between locks.
You don't see it often because newer boaters don't know how, and —oh no— they'd have to talk about something other than the weather. It takes experience, trust and collaboration.
In the photo, one boat is crewed. It is steering both, using only one engine. The other boat crew is operating locks.
Living on a boat with a refillable water tank, I've learned to conserve water.
I wash daily but only shower once a week, because:
It's a waste to run lots of water over your body and then pump it overboard.
Human skin is great at keeping clean and oil-free without any help from Proctor & Gamble IF you let it recover from the chemical abuse of "body wash" etc.
Canal and River Trust brought 3 steel barges to the marina. Each one arrived on its own lorry/truck. A separate crane lifte them into the basin.
Here you can see a tug (blue) holding a barge in place in the basin, while a crane (yellow) lifts another barge over to the basin. A second tug has already left with the third barge.
That's yesterday. Today, three CRT vehicles and crew are parked here, waiting for …?
We were busy with locks and watching for a chandlery to buy coal, not watching the sky.
By the time we descended Church Minshull lock, it was full sun—but low in the sky because it's less than a week to November.
Photo: We are passing a traditional carrier type of narrowboat, with its 2-stroke engine. It's not a putt-putt-putt sound; it's lower and more blutt-blutt-blutt.
We waited in vain for the fog to burn off. After wasting the morning with that, we have decided to get moving.
We're winding the boat after bridge 91, and then heading back north to the Middlewich Arm, which connects Shropshire Union canal to the Trent & Mersey canal.
Rainy-day boredom:
• I took a photo of an open porthole. (See below.)
• My husband discovered that his nose fits in my ear in some new way, which he demonstrated.
At 4pm the rain is scheduled to ease, at which point we'll get underway. No point in getting soaked now when there's no place else we have to be.
Many canals converge on Manchester—under brick arches and steel railway bridges. Former canalside warehouses are in rough shape, except those converted to housing or offices. Footbridges, unexpected stairs, and stone towpaths along the canals and basins make a delightful maze.
Maximum stay: 72 hours. No return for 14 days. There are many museums and architectural marvels to see, and the Alan Turing memorial.