Botany Bay (good to see The Pennines at last)

Firstly, I need to make an apology to the lovely Aussie/Brit couple we shared locks with yesterday.  I mistakenly called them Paul and Jackie in yesterday's blog, and they contacted me this morning saying their names were actually Clive and Jenny.  So – sorry Clive and Jenny 😉

The other apology is to Karen as she pointed out I missed a Payne-ful escapade, or nasturtiumgate as Sophie called it, in yesterday’s blog.  Let me explain:

  

The picture on the left shows Clive & Jenny’s boat on the left and us on the right in one of the Wigan locks. The picture on the right shows both our boats in the next lock up.  You can probably see the difference – neither boat has plants on the front on the right-hand picture. 

Gate paddles shouldn’t normally be opened until the ground paddles have let enough water into the lock so that the water covers the gate paddles.  This means water doesn’t come pouring through the gate paddles onto the boat.  One of the ground paddles wasn’t working, so we decided to slowly open a gate paddle to speed things up.  On normal length locks we would reverse the boats right back leaving plenty of room.  With only a few feet spare on these locks it wasn’t possible to leave much space.

As Karen said, ‘The gate paddle was much feistier than expected’ ☹ Immediately, the plants were washed into the water.  Clive managed to rescue some nasturtiums, still in their canvas bag, as it floated past his boat.  He then went down to move the plant on their front onto his back deck before he lost that one!

As we had been moored by the top lock at Wigan on Sunday night there was a lot of activity from about 7.30 on Monday morning.  Boats were getting positioned ready to get down the locks as soon as the padlocks were removed.  We had to chuckle as the boat at the front was called, ‘No Rush’.

We stayed where we were and set off for a cruise just before midday. We were hoping to get through Adlington and Chorley and up the seven locks at Johnson's Hill before mooring up for the day.

We have noticed that most of the bridge arches on this canal have a white mark indicating the centre of the channel, which is offset because the towpath also goes through the arch:

Centre mark would be particularly useful for widebeams I suspect

The canal was really rather pleasant as we headed north, with plenty of tree lined cuttings followed by wide open stretches.  The only issue we found was that there was a lot of weed which necessitated two visits to the weed hatch.  It made a nice change to have weed and not rubbish wrapped around the prop though.

One of the more open stretches

The start of The Pennines finally in sight

Fishing for lunch

Pretty but low bridge carrying the towpath over an entrance to a pool

We stopped at Chorley for lunch and, as the sun had come out, hung the washing out.  After lunch we popped into Chorley as we needed to pick something up.  Unfortunately, or fortunately depending on your viewpoint, the canal skirts round the east side of the town so boaters don’t see it.

Moored for lunch at Chorley with the rescued bag of nasturtiums back on front

We carried on a bit later and stopped to take on water just before Botany Bay.  By the time we were ready to set off again it was five o’clock, so we decided to give the locks a miss and moor up below them as soon as we found somewhere we fancied.

Moored for Monday evening – note mini sunflowers and a petunia have joined the nasturtiums on the front 😊

The mill in the background is called Botany Bay Mill and was built in the first half of the 19^th century as a cotton spinning mill.  It is now a shopping centre but at least it still stands.

Botany Bay shopping centre from our Monday evening mooring

So, in the end we travelled nine lock-free miles during the day and will tackle the Johnson's Hill locks first thing on Tuesday.  And, who knows, we may even travel a further nine miles and go up the six locks in Blackburn too.