Time to ‘go home’! Farewell jellyfish. We recommend Liverpool for a ‘Citybreak’ but make it a long weekend and stay near Albert dock. Loads to see and do and a base relatively close to the city centre as well as all the dock attractions.
07:45 saw us leaving Salthouse dock, passing through several more, two locks and three tunnels before ascending four very heavy locks back onto the Leeds and Liverpool canal. We were joined in these locks by nb Francesca with Lady Ada close behind. The CaRT team of lockies were excellent with three volunteers assisting us up the flight. Thanks folks – your service was first class.
Lady Ada wasn’t far behind but word came on the radio that a fourth boat was just leaving Salthouse and so they had to wait inside the bottom lock for this other boat to arrive. Shame they didn’t know about that, they might have been able to have an extra half hour in bed.
Out the top and we let nb Francesca go first as they wanted to get through both bridge 9 and bridge 20 before the relevant curfews came into place. We stopped at Litherland services where Graham did a self-pumpout and a water fill whilst Brenda hit Tescos (next door) for pies and ice-creams. Fortyfive minutes later we were on our way again hoping to get the bridge 9 before 2pm. The wind was very strong today but it only disadvantaged us once.
We joined up with a brand-spanking-new boat as we approached a number of swing bridges. We’s seen them at Litherland, during our pumpout, opening the swing bridge but soon caught up with them again. The steerer announced that he was “with these two novices” indicating his crew. The female appeared attached to a small dog by a lead. Everywhere she got off/went then the little dog went too – regardless of their safety or whether the lead was across the whole towpath width.
Their inexperience and the difficulties experienced coping with all the very different procedures required by each swingbridge along this section was compounded by their brand new anti-vandal key being the wrong size and not fitting the hand-cuffs.
We arrived at Hancock’s bridge at 13:50 – 10 minutes before the 14:00 deadline, and passed through OK. As we continued on we learnt that Coxhead’s bridge (20), which had been the subject of a vandal attack months ago, was now fully working again – hooray! This meant that we didn’t need to moor up and wait until 12:00 tomorrow to get through it.
Once through, we moored in the countryside just before Haskayne. After 5 nights of city noise we are looking forward to a nice peaceful rural night tonight.
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