Big Trip - Day 10

There was bright sunshine first thing, but the promise of a nice day soon faded.  We hoped we might have been first up the locks, but as we got up at 7am a boat came past to start their ascent.  We set off an hour later, as the mist came over.  We had to turn every lock, but soon got into a good rhythm.

The top gates have no walkways, so there's a lot of walking round to be done, but when the lock was full, Adrian opened the gate and closed the offside paddle, then stopped the boat in the mouth of the lock to close the gate again.  Sometimes, he did both sides while I was getting the next lock ready.

We completed the twelve locks is just under two hours, which we thought was pretty good going bearing in mind that we'd seen no other boats.  Of course there was one arriving at the top when we got there.  By then, the bread machine had finished making a loaf, and we stopped on the water point and began a wash load.

At the electric swing bridge at the Fools Nook, a boat in front of us opened the bridge and waved us through.  They were stopping immediately afterwards.

At the manual swing bridge a little further on, a single-hander was coming the other way, so was glad we did the bridge for him.

At Gurnett Aqueduct, on the outskirts of Macclesfield, CRT were working on the weir, and operating off a working boat.

Macclesfield doesn't really make the best of the canal.  There's an impressive retaining wall on the approach, the canal gives views over the rooftops, and Hovis Mill is pretty impressive.  But the moorings aren't good and there's not a lot to see from the canal.  But at least there's a new water point, which looks very much easier to access (and presumably doesn't suffer like the old one in having a Mr Angry living nearby).  It's much more pretty once you're through the town.

We'd hoped to stop in Bollington for the night, because I really wanted to walk up the hill to the White Nancy.  But although was made several attempts at mooring, there were always problems.  The visitor moorings appear to have rocks under the water, and if they're in the wrong place you end up pivoting the boat on them and having one end or the other six feet out in the canal.  It was a pity, because Clarence Mill looked good in the sunshine.

We made several more attempts at finding somewhere to stop, but the shallow edges of the canal prevented us until we got to Lyme View -- a good few miles on from where we'd intended to be.  At least it means that we have a very short run into Braidbar tomorrow, when it's supposed to be raining.

12 miles, 12 locks.  (139 miles, 73 locks)