Waiting for bridges.

As we embarked yesterday I knew an old friend had visited. We used to have a persistent leak from a back cabin window, it smelt like a wet dog – Pluvius. It’s been an exceptionally wet week , so Pluvius was back. G had a search around this morning, having listened to the drips during the night, and found the problem this morning. Emergency repair made, we set off in more rain.
          
Wet set off in more rain but it soon cleared and produced occasional sunshine in a cloudy sky. It was an odd day as we had to stop and moor up twice to wait for swing bridges to become available to pass through. The first only opened for an hour at midday, with queues of boats waiting to pass through in both directions. It had been severely vandalized and repair work had stop as CaRT staff opened the bridge to allow us through.

Wildlife of the day - whilst waiting in the queue we sat and watched a family of Water Voles going about their business in the reeds on the opposite bank – a pair off adults with two babies swimming too and fro between the reeds and their nest site.

Last Northbound boat through the bridge – a cruiser being towed by an inflatable boat going in reverse and then we could all set off as well. G asked a CaRT volunteer why the Northbound boats were allowed through first as all the Southbound were trying to get to bridge 12 before 2pm when it stopped working until 6pm due to peak vehicle traffic. His response was “ we always let them go first “ – cheers pal!

  As it was we got there at 2:30pm so had to wait another 3.5 hours before we could continue on towards our planned destination of Litherland services. We had a small flotilla so we took it in turns to open bridges, let everyone through, close up and then join on the end.

As we passed Aintree racecourse we could see the elevated TV cameras above the walls so there must be a race meeting on there today. The flotilla finally moored up for the night at Litherland on the CaRT services, right outside the 24hour Tescos, at 8pm.