Froghall Back To Hazelhurst Then Onto Eturia, 15 Locks And 1 Staircase. Eturia To Stone, 10 Locks.

Catch up time.

While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping.

As of one gently rapping at my chamber door "Tis some visitor", I muttered, tapping at my chamber door "only this and nothing more".

It's the rain hitting the roof you idiot,

Quoth the Raven.

And so another day began.

Leaving Froghall I just had to reverse through the final bridge to see the end of the line, we didn't expect to find a trip boat moored in there though. I wonder when that moves?

Moving back to Hazelhurst Junction for the night there was a lot of very narrow canal to negotiate. Not the least of which is the station platform at Cosnal Forge, they have built the supports and braces well into the canal space, this, combined with a very overgrown bank leaves very little room for the passing of boats.

Leaving Hazelhurst on a very wet morning we had the misfortune of being in front of this boat........ Beatrice.
I know it was a wet and miserable day but even so it was not as miserable as this bloke.
He owns the canal, or so he thinks, and every other boat should just not be there.
He travels at twice the speed of everyone else and demands you get out of his way.

Well, we beat him to the first lock (not by speeding, it was just that the canal was too narrow to pass)  he actually got off his boat and threw his windlass onto the towpath with such a clang and stomped around.
In eighteen months out here this is the worst one we have come across so all in all it's quite funny really.

Setting off early from our Eturia mooring we got as far as the top lock, which was all of a hundred feet away, and we were stopped by the men from BW. 
It seemed that the high fore headed knuckle draggers had been messing with the flight overnight and had managed to drain the pounds.

To our rather strange delight Mr Grumpy turned up behind us while we were waiting and his face was an absolute purple picture........... Relax.

It was a beautiful morning but by nine o'clock the Sky's darkened over and down came the rain again. 

Reaching the top lock of the Meadford Flight just outside of Stone, we found we were at the back of a queue of four boats. It turned out that the men from BW had been rapidly fixing a dislodged paddle that a boat had hit earlier in the day.

With the men gone we were soon on our way again.
Kudos to the men from BW..... this time.

We may stay here for a few days, a selection of shops and a garage can be a blessing to an itinerate  narrowboat and it's crew.



Until next time..........................



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Hazelhurst Junction To Froghall, 8 Locks And 1 Tunnel.




A bit of caving with Ubique then onto what seems to be the biggest waste of money we have seen.

Off we go to Froghall and probably the lowest tunnel on the waterways. That sign is still pointing to Uttoxeter at twenty miles away but the canal terminates at Froghall nowadays.

Having to join the River Churnet for some of the journey this sign made strict reading. River extremely dangerous when in flood, it gravely warns.

Why then are there no such warning boards or gauges from the other end of the river?

Here's the gauge board, there is an awful lot of red above an inch or so of green. The water was well below the green and into the brown.......... Oh hang on that was mud.

Dropping the last lock back onto the canal there is this High Tec profile gauge of the forthcoming tunnel, I went through as accurately as I could but we hit it all over the place, no tunnel for us then......... Or so it seemed.

Not being one to pay too much attention to things of this nature I thought we could just nose Ubique in and see what happens. If we touch I can just reverse out anyway.

It was tight in there, very very tight but we hadn't come here to turn back so we pressed on through. With me on my knees steering and D in the bows keeping us on track we made it through with all paint intact and emerged to a crowd of people on the towpath watching us. Where do they come from?

I'm not too sure what the biggest surprise of the day was, finding this lock in pristine condition or the water point next to it.
We just had to see where that lock went.

It dropped into this mooring basin!

Why is this here? Who's idea was this then?
The place is so under used it is choked with weed and suffering badly from the Blue Green Algae.
There cannot ever have been that many boats making the trip through that tunnel to warrant building this basin here.
The profile gauges alone are so hopelessly wrong at the moment they must be deterring a lot of potential visitors.


There are a lot of gates that could have been repaired with the money it must have cost to build this white elephant.




Until next time.................




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Hazelhurst Junction And Back, 1 Tunnel.



A very lazy Sunday..............

 

Here's an interesting fact about the Caldon canal that Heth on Takey Tezey might like.
This canal is 484ft above sea level in the summit pound which is 14ft higher than the summit pound of the Leeds Liverpool.
The funny thing here is..... this canal is full of water!
The gates don't leak too much and there is a pumping system that works.


BW, left hand? right hand?

Some people like straight canals others like a few twists and turns, personally I like very narrow canals with Z bends to keep me on my tiller toes.

The Leek branch of the Caldon is my kind of canal.

There is even a tunnel just to add interest.
D was on the phone to our daughter as we entered this tunnel, the signal stayed with us until we exited at the other end.
Chugging through the bowels of a hill chatting on the phone is strange to say the least, but why then, when you exit the tunnel do you lose the signal? Odd...most odd.

Why? and I repeat why, do some canal boaters do this?  Packing together like a litter of cats, dogs, or sheep in the field.

This is the end of the line for this branch and it is packed with boats.
This whole stretch has much better solitary moorings all along its length but it seems to be an instinct to herd together that drives them on.
Another funny thing is that they will moan profusely if the boat ahead or behind starts their engine to charge the batteries.

This is an Eucalyptus tree in someones garden, with, of course, added Koala bear and baby.

In the world of canal boating there are the speeders, the slow, the very slow and Ubique speed.
We do not travel quickly and normally we are pulling over to let people through.

The man ahead of us is travelling at the speed of a tectonic plate, we have actually caught him up!!

Tickover was too much so we just came out of gear and drifted along behind him.

We are now back where we started from this morning, overlooking the main line of the canal as it drops through the locks towards Cheddleton. That will be us tomorrow.




Until next time.........................




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