To Crick: Day 1

I was up at a reasonable time again today, because I wanted to do the job I’d been intending to do on Friday, re-doing the sealant in the shower.  Getting the old stuff off is a horrible job, but I’ve done it a few times now so have developed some techniques.  Even so, it took more than an hour of scraping and cutting.

After cleaning and drying the area, adding the new sealant is fairly straightforward, and this time I treated myself to a £3 smoothing tool when we bought the sealant, which was a revelation.  The finish is much neater than I’ve achieved before.

Meanwhile, Adrian was on his way back from his weekend in Weymouth, and was going to do a food shop for the next few days en route.  Once I’d finished the sealant, I took our washing pile up to the machines outside Morrison’s, and while it was washing walked up to Halford’s for the correct sort of fuse for the Eberspacher.  After the washing was in the dryer, Adrian arrived and we had tea in the cafe while we waited.  Then we took the car back to its parking place, and took the shopping and washing back to the boat.  Adrian unpacked the shopping while I replaced the fuse and put the Eberspacher control box back together and back on the wall of the cupboard.  Then we had lunch, and finally untied from the Festival Park moorings, where it feels like we’ve been for ages (5 nights in fact, which seems like a long time to us).  The top Stoke lock just needed topping up.

There was a boat waiting below, and they had a boat behind them whose crew topped up the second lock for us so we could go straight in.

Only the bottom lock was more than a few inches down, so we made quick work of the flight — getting from our mooring to the bottom in an hour.  As we came out of the bottom lock we could see two boats coming, so left the gates open.  We made a quick visit down the weedhatch, but there were only a few twigs wrapped round the prop, and then carried on out of Stoke, where the canal lines up with the incinerator chimney.

On the approach to Hem Heath is a big Barratt Homes development, which has a line of pylons striding through the middle of it.

As we got to Trentham Lock a boat was just leaving, so the timing was excellent.  We moored through the next bridge close to where we stopped a few weeks ago.  There are more boats here now, so we don’t have one of the spots with the best view of the trains.

We are heading to the Crick Show, which is on the late May bank holiday.  It’s about a ten day journey to get there,  it we’ll be taking more like 20.

5 miles, 6 locks.