Southbound on a mission

Wednesday 4th July 2018

Birthday of the day – Happy Birthday sister Julie

Wildlife of the day – a family steak & kidney sized Terrapin basking on a tree root.

Plant of the day – a Monkey Puzzle tree in flower – never seen that before.

Graffiti du jour – “No licence hike, No gentrification of the canals!” Oh, so when the licence price goes up it has nothing to do with the rising costs of maintenance then. It’s just a ploy to get less well off boaters off the system then. Perception – what’s that all about?

We set off from Great Haywood just as a boat pulled out of the marina in front of us. We followed them through Gt Haywood lock and shortly afterwards arrived at Colwich lock where we were 5th in the queue to go down.

As we passed Spode Hall online moorings we noticed that CaRT appear to have rebranded their on-line moorings operation as well. There is a boat and a mooring on it, no ambiguous circles. Just does what it says on the tin! It can be done then? Any-one can see what this logo is about, we wonder if it was a buy-one, get one free offer. At least it’s clear what this one is unlike the sunken tyre.

Shopping stop at Rugely a restock of Jubblies, we’ve eaten a weeks supply from about two years ago in this weather ; Gin, the slippery slope and a reduced price beer kit – happy days.

We then continued on through Armitage, where we spotted this wonderful washing line, onto Fradley where we passed down through the three locks and turned onto the Coventry canal (pedant bait) to fill with water and then look for an overnight mooring. No luck so we tried a bit further on but the sides were too shallow to get close in.

We finally moored up on a stretch of piling about half a mile south of the junction. It’s quite close to the A38 so ranks as our noisiest mooring this trip. We normally dine in when it’s hot but tonight we sat out in the foredeck, in the marginally cooler air, and eat on the cratch table avec Deet!

Graham & Brenda