Rain in Windsor
If I remember correctly the last time it rained was during the first two weeks of May.
Today it is still raining in Windsor for the second day in a row – sunny spells and heavy showers makes the heat wave of the last couple of weeks seem a long time ago.
Middlewich to Northwich, Trent and Mersey Canal: 6 Miles, 0 Locks
The first cruising log entry of the year in which Zulu takes a battering from the weather and spends the first night away from home amidst the spotlights of Northwich chemical works.
I was actually hoping to get to Marston but with darkness upon us and the wind blowing a gale, not to mention the lashing rain I thought enough’s enough and stepped off the boat holding both bow and stern lines into mud which covered my shoes. It is an awful feeling when you know you are about to fall over but the thought of Zulu’s high bows being whipped over to the other side of the canal and through someone’s window was suffficient to hold on and stay upright while attemting to bring both ends of the boat to a standstill at the same time, preferably against the bank.
Knocking pins into mud is about as much an anticlimax as I can conjur up - one tap of the mallet and 8 inches of steel sinks out of sight. No chance that’s going to hold for the night. Perhaps prayers do work occasionally, as about 1 boats length further on was a single unoccupied ring set into concrete. We were able to moor safely after all, without having to spend a midnight vigil out on deck worrying about where the bows went.
Apart from that nothing much to report – 6 miles of wind and rain with a tricky ending.
Ah.. yes there is… for the last 4 months BW have been improving the towpath through Middlewich – and not before time, as half of it was permanently under water. A marvellous job has been done – the lowest sections have been raised well above the waterline and a hardcore path with wooden borders has replaced the worn and muddy towpath. What more could we want? We certainly do not want the top coat of compacted red sand which they have laid today. Imagine a muddy dog and a couple of muddy boots. Soaked to the skin and well caked with mud. What could possibly be worse than all of the above coated in a layer of red sticky sand. Well thats what we got today.
Middlewich towpath improvements - before (26-Oct-08) and after (03-Mar-09)
I don’t know why every time I think about BW I come up with a negative, but once again they have ruined a wonderful improvement with a poorly thought out finish. Literally. And why? Something to do with it being a national cycle path, according to word on the towpath but I fail to see the connection between this and dumping 200 tonnes of red sand for us to trail into our boats. I will say no more and simply wait while the rain washes it away, when it will once again be a clean hardcore surface, cycle path or not.
Spoilt for choice of moorings? We could be seeing the first signs in a month where global economy has gone mad and at least one major marina development has been shelved. There’s even talk of allowing boats without a permanent mooring to pay an annual towpath mooring fee which sounds like another British Waterways scatterbrained idea which is bound to backfire.
Today (12th December) the BW Mooring Tenders website listed four mooring tenders to be completed at 13:00. Three of them closed without any bids at all, despite in my opinion, there being a lot worse places to moor than Whaley Bridge (22m towpath mooring with no bids) or the immensely popular moorings at Claverton on the K&A where a 15m berth suitable for a widebeam has also been ignored. I don’t think I can recall another day where so many moorings were returned with no bids. In fact this week out of 13 tenders, only 8 had any bids at all and most of those were more or less equal to the guide price, apart from one very low below the reserve and one exceptionally high, more of which in a second. Even more unusual this week is that out of 13 vacancies, no less than 3 were for residential moorings and out of the 10 leisure moorings 6 are still vacant.
To keep things in the balance, however, there is another first on the mooring tenders site this week. The first mooring bid over £9,000 pounds per annum (excluding Poplar Marina on the tidal Thames) was tendered this week, for a residential berth in the Engineers Wharf moorings on the Paddington Arm at Northolt. This location is in itself very unusual as it is a new development of waterside flats, Grand Union Village, incorporating 23 moorings which much to the amazement of everyone concerned were all granted residential status by the local council earlier this year. So this month has set a very dangerous precedent in valuing the moorings in this area – with the recommended guide price of £5,250 now being dwarfed by a successful tender this week of £9,250 per annum, beating the previous record bid for a mooring where another berth in the same location reached £8,250 on December 1st.
Is this the most expensive rented mooring on the canal system? A new two bed flat here in the Grand Union Village overlooking this mooring is available for rent of £11,400 per annum – just £2,150 more than a pair of mooring rings!
So is this system really a fair platform for mooring allocation? I have no objection to an auction based system but this is no fair auction. BW do plan to amend the system to become a true auction where bidders will be permitted to compete with each other instead of blindly throwing money away and such a system should finally allow a balanced picture of the true value of moorings to emerge, but no date has yet been set so how much more craziness can we expect in the meantime?
Big Lock Middlewich
When Zulu arrived in Middlewich I was pretty alarmed to find that the Big Lock pub was closed. Apparently the pub chain which held the lease had gone bust in September the tenants had to leave. A pub without lights is a terrible sight and with so many closing for good, this didn’t look a good omen.
Punch Taverns, the owners, were quick to react by putting in a temporary manager, but for the last couple of months it has only been open for beer lager and not much else, and then only when they felt like opening. The ominous signs were plastered over the outside “You could manage this pub” and it didn’t look good.
So I am delighted to be able to report that the Big Lock has fully reopened for business as from the end of November. Tonight I ventured in for the first time, dreading being the first customer to order bitter but far from the expected creamflow, I was offered draught Tetley, Spitfire, Bombardier and Black Sheep, all as guest beers and starting at two pounds a pint. And very nice it was too. So good in fact that I stayed for another, and since most of the customers (yes it was quite busy) seemed to be eating, I joined in and had the home made chilli.
Pickles Family Get Keys to Big Lock (Middlewich Guardian) 8-Dec - it even got a mention in the local press, which goes on to explain that a former local landlady (ex Narrowboat pub) and her son have taken the challenge, which is a good sign indeed.
“Would you like that mild, medium, hot or hotter?” Now thats a first! It was also extremely good home made chilli served with half and half, rice and chips and nachos and all for £5.50. Most other dishes are from 5 to 9 pounds, and many come with a separate side salad or fresh vegetables and all I heard from other tables was how nice the food was; everything I could see appeared to be home made too, apart from my chips which had been frozen and then kept warm too long.
The pool table is gone and the front room is now more of a bar than games room and whilst a little bland under a welcome fresh coat of paint, the place is quite nice considering it is in its first couple of weeks of opening. However the huge industrial carvery unit plonked in the restaurant area looks like something beamed in from a 60s function room, although the prices seem equally dated, at only £3.95 for a carvery lunch. I wonder if this is really going to pay?
But please let me be first to congratulate the new tenants online – and let me recommend to any passing boaters that they leave their past impressions behind and give it a try. Value for money: 10/10. Food Quality:8/10 (let down by the chips). Beer: 9/10. I will be asking if they can sort out wifi for customers (and boaters, since 3G is so bad in the area) and maybe turn down the music, although I have to say that the thumping disco beat was quite uplifting and certainly wasn’t lift music!
With Zulu’s moorings right outside I’m quite proud to be able to call it my local.
I was in the Bristol area with a couple of hours to kill on Saturday and in such a situation I always try to visit somewhere new on the waterways. So while the sun was shining I made a quick detour down to the Severn to check out Portishead Quay Marina, the overnight staging point for narrowboats making the upstream trip from Bristol to Sharpness.
Locking up from the Severn into Portishead Quay Marina
It surprised me when I first learnt that when leaving the Avon at Avonmouth boats need to turn left and head downstream rather than the obvious upstream approach. When you see the 15-20ft rise from low tide up to marina level at the entry lock to Portishead marina then it helps to understand why! If the tide can rise this much then a poor narrowboat isn’t going to have a chance of making any headway while it is running in the wrong direction, and so doing a full run upsteam on a rising tide would make lots of sense. Furthermore the approach to Sharpness lock can only be made an hour or so before either side of high tide so you need to time arrival fairly precisely.
Portishead Quays Marina
Portishead marina is being rapidly developed in typical waterside style with more than enough new flats to choose from and several new waterside brasseries seem to be opening. All of this within a few minutes walk of the quite pleasant town centre, and on the site of the old power station. There are boats of all shapes and sizes but no narrowboats today. I guess than even in the summer they are still fairly rare visitors.
The lock was however in full swing – operated from a modern control cabin, it has floating pontoons along each side and so boats have a steady mooring – the water looks quite turbulent as it enters the lock by cracking the gates open rather than by conventional sluices, and quite a Saturday afternoon crowd had assembled to watch the operations. There’s even a mobile cafe at the lock, plus a much more sophisticated Lock House brasserie/restaurant in the old lockside buildings. The lock is actually a shadow of its former self having been vastly reduced in size when the marina was built, allegedly saving some 4 million gallons per operation, and old Vickers of Newcastle hydraulic gear is pleasantly preserved along with some of the old lock gates. Altogether quite an interesting place, and I look forward visiting by boat and spending a night here in the future, although I understand it will not be a cheap place to stay!
So now I know what to expect when we come down beyond Bristol. Quite exciting really – I wonder if we will have time to do it this coming summer?
Well I have had a lovely day yesterday playing with my new iPhone and felt the urge to review all my old tech stuff, so taking a look at my T-Mobile mobile broadband invoice at £44 flat rate for unlimited throughput, (which actually means 10Gb per month according to the small print), and comparing it to their current pricing of £30 per month I decided to shop around for a better broadband package.
There are some great deals on the market, but there’s always some small print. Amidst terrifying tales of paying £6 per megabyte for data access out of contract, which would value my 10Gb package at something in the region of £6,144 per month at this rate, there are also plenty of complaints on the internet that even with a contract there can be a nasty surprise if you over run the bundled bandwidth, for instance Three charge 10p per megabyte which equals £102.40 per gigabyte. Few suppliers actually offer high volume contracts – it boiled down to T-Mobile unlimited again at £30.00 per month, Three at £30.00 for 15Gb or O2 with 10Gb for £35.00. Three I already have as a backup and it is quite slow in places. T-Mobile and O2 both offer free wifi access in the UK too, so I decided to renew the contract with T-Mobile where there is no risk of a huge additional bill at the end of the month.
They offered a fiver discount to keep the old modem, but studying the small print showed that their current model was in theory much faster. It arrived this morning, only 15 hours after ordering it, worked perfectly for an hour and then blue screened my brand new computer when I removed it for the first time. Not a good start. But the saving grace is that the speeds I am getting today are spectacular. I can upload at am amazing1,600 kbps and download about 450 which is not so good but still quite fast.
Naturally for lite users there are some much cheaper packages around – theres nothing wrong with a tenner a month for a 1Gb pay as you go package from Three but like I said the other day, I can use this up in a few hours. Where? Well for a start I back up all my files and photos online at iDrive, and thats a huge overhead. Software upgrades and connections to remote desktops account for other big chunks and the occasional massive email attachment or two every day can also play havoc. World of Warcraft takes the biscuit though. They have released a patch this week which is stretching the limits – why? Its not just that it is 1.8 Gigabytes, but while downloading it also uploads to other computers without telling you. Potentially I could use all 10Gb by leaving this on all night – but what about those who only have a 1Gb package in the first place, or pay up to 200 pounds extra.
This really does need to be sorted out – it is absolutely unfair that people end up bankrupt after some software they never heard of supplied gigabytes of uploads while they were asleep.
Now back to T-Mobile, if only the software was better (although its actually the modem drives which are causing it) – my network icon has been removed and is greyed out when I try to restore it – then this would be one excellent upgrade while saving £14.00 per month into the bargain.
I have to be online daily, as whilst I lead a nomadic life, it can only be paid for by occasional bursts of activity on various computer systems which are usually too far away to visit. The internet bridges the gap – I can usually put things right wherever I am, as long as the laptop and internet connection are both functioning.
Last week the laptop woke me up at 3am with a scream – yes the laptop, and not me. It was definitely not well, and in the morning it refused to go beyond a repeat of this awful noise. Realising this was serious, and not having time to work out if it was repairable, I duly headed to PCWorld and came home with a lovely new one.
Fortunately, when the dust had settled, I realised that the screaming noise was most likely due to a keyboard error, and found if booted to DOS, the W, S and X keys still worked confirming that the rest of the keys didn’t. Unable to spell anything using these keys alone, I ordered a new keyboard from ebay which has sorted out the problem and now I have a spare laptop to take travelling! Cost of repair £15.00.
Anyway T-Mobile, my normal means of connecting to the internet, turns out to be pathetically slow here in Middlewich – one thing I forgot to check before taking the mooring here. So today I checked who did provide 3G service to Middlewich and was pleased to find that Three do and so for emergency use only, I am now the proud owner of two mobile broadband systems, as well of course as two laptops and err… two boats including two of almost everything else needed to equip a boat.
Three 3G works too (thank goodness), and very fast it is. But as a trial I have taken out the PAYG option which gives only 1Gb or 30 days for a tenner. I have used 20% of this today alone without really doing anything. As I said – its for emergency use only – but how can they possibly pretend that this bandwidth is suitable for a month’s worth of browsing and email!
Middlewich was lovely this week in the sunshine, but this morning the winds and rain arrived as forecast so we jumped in the car and did what all good boaters do on their day off; went to see some boats.
Ellesmere Port Boat Museum
The first thing I noticed about Ellesmere port, apart from the incredibly industrial landscape, was the twinned locks descending from the Shropshire Union Canal into the Manchester Ship Canal – like the reels on a fruit machine dropping into place I suddenely remembered I had been here before, possibly on a day trip from University in the 70s.
The location is wonderful as the wide locks, alongside the narrow locks descend to the basins around the new Holiday Inn and onwards through lock number 1 into the Ship Canal. I have never paid to see a flight of locks before but the frustration of looking through a fence was too much and I just had to go in!
I recently read about the downturn in fortunes of the museum so rather than pay the £5.50 entry fee I opted for the £13.00 annual pass, although I guess this may be the first and last visit here this year. However it also works at Stoke Bruerne and Gloucester and so seems quite good value all in the aid of a good cause.
Admittedly it was late in the day, but there were in fact only 6 other visitors still on site, which presumably is due to the credit crunch. Well everything else is, so why not blame it anyway.
I must admit to quite enjoying the visit, although it was very sad to see so many old boats decaying without any form of restoration, other than the odd pump to keep them from hitting the bottom.
It certainly passed a rainy afternoon.
Well this was supposed to be a cruising blog, with regular updates, but it hasn’t quite worked out that way. According to my last cruising post we were somewhere around Cropredy having arrived there via the Grand Union from Ricky and a side trip to Hawkesbury en route.
So now Zulu is at home in Middlewich on her BW mooring just by Kings Lock below Middlewich Big Lock (thanks Dave!!). We arrived a couple of weeks ago via Coventry, Ashby, Birmingham, Stourbridge, Great Haywood, Stoke, Harecastle and have clocked up 354 miles and 338 locks since being relaunched at Winkwell all those weeks ago, and I have to say that for an old boat with old engine we have done it totally incident free, which gives me great confidence in the old girl.
Middlewich is not the most celebrated location on the waterways but has a special place in my memories as it was here, in 1975, that I first set foot on a narrowboat when the school canal society undertook its inaugural trip, from Middlewich to Llangollen. Willow Wren is long gone, but nobody will pass through Wardle lock without being greeted by Maureen who used to help run the old hire fleet.
The second thing I like about being at Middlewich is the growing reputation of the Middlewich Folk and Boat Festival which transforms the town every summer, and combines music, dance and canalia. I look forward to being here on my own boat next summer but this year we made it by car – the dates will be Friday 19th – Sunday 21st June 2009.
Middlewich has little else to celebrate. It is a working town based on salt mining still very much in evidence, and sadly no railway station. For canal visitors it has a pubs, allegedly a very good chip shop, various takeways and a general air of “may be getting better”, although it never quite seems to get there.
Zulus new moorings at Big Lock, Middlewich
Our new moorings, on the other hand, are excellent. I had bid on the Mooring Tenders system without actually visiting, although I have passed the site many times before, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that the old derelict land opposite was now being developed, and that behind our mooring are fields and woods separated from the path by a stream, and during our short time there literally dozens of dogs came past and said hello to Seth, who thinks we have arrived in dog paradise.
Just before arriving at Middlewich we passed some other very nice looking farm moorings, only to find Andante, my lovely old 32ft trad boat, originally sold to Sarah and now in the hands of the third new owner and renamed Saxon. She is still unmistakable and now in her new livery she has been given a lot of attention including shiny brass and gleaming paintwork. She certainly seems to have been given a new lease of life and I hope I may meet her new owners soon.
Without a station, Middlewich is not the most easy place to reach from our other home moorings down south, the choice between car or bus/train being made all the harder due to the crazy way which discounted rail fares appear while planning journeys. It can be anything from 10 to 100 pounds depending on which train and which method of searching you carry out. I will write more about this soon, as I have a number of proven methods of reducing train fares by breaking the journey down into smaller sections.
So with Zulu parked up safe and sound after so many hours of cruising I jumped in the car, turned onto the M6 and duly blew up the radiator before we had even reached Sandbach services. At times like this on a dark cold Sunday night, 150 miles from home, I was so thankful that I had renewed my breakdown cover and spent the next 4 hours dozing off in the cab of a RAC rescue truck. Incredibly the year’s RAC membership was half paid for by not using any petrol on the way home.
So our first day in Middlewich eventually ended on a high after all. I will be back on Zulu next weekend but for now I may use a few of these cold dark evenings to catch up on a bit of retro-blogging and fill in some of the gaps.
In the 60s the family used to urge the old Wolsley over the Carter Bar into Scotland and visit our relations on the Isle of Arran, which involved taking the ferry from Ardrossan to Brodick.
As a special treat we would take one of the Clyde Steamers on a day trip around the Clyde estuary, visiting Rothesay, Millport, Gourock, Dynoon, Largs and even Campbeltown. The Queen Mary and the Waverley were the two most regular steamers and even in those days they seemed like a window to an Art Deco world which was fast slipping away.
A couple of weeks ago I had a trip down memory lane with a quick road trip to Arran and I was delighted to find that the Balmoral was operating pleasure trips, although not when I was there. I totally missed the fact that the Waverley would be back on the Clyde in October, let alone the fact that she would be operating on the Thames this weekend.
It must have been fate which took me to her website and on Saturday morning I dropped everything and headed to Southend pier, the longest in the world, for a stunning trip back up the Thames into the Pool of London, to Tower Pier. A trip back to Southend was another memory jogger as I lived there in the 80s for a few years, and it sure seems that nothing much has changed, apart from a few more fires on the pier. I didn’t have time to explore my old haunts so went straight down to the end of the pier just as Waverley was arriving.
After 40 years I immediately recognised her presence – she glides along almost silently, a row of heads on the upper deck, two funnels and the gorgeous wooden bridge being all you initially saw as she drew up to the end of the pier on low tide. 70 feet of water on the landing stage at low tide apparently and shallow enough to stand up on the other side. The engine telegraph clanged again as the engines were reversed and soon some 1000 people were disembarking up the slippery old steps of the lower deck of the pier, which are so rarely used these days.
Just as quickly we were boarding and departed bang on schedule in a flurry of paddles whipping up the sea and a couple of blasts on the steam whistle. She is one of the very few craft which deliberately drops her ropes into the sea on departure – theres no propellors to foul, although we very nearly brought part of the pier with us as the stern line refused to drop off the rotting old woodwork into the water, but all was well.
Time to look around – Waverley is immaculate with varnished wood, polished brass and painted metalwork. Little changed if at all since the 50s. Theres a coffee shop, two bars and a restaurant so theres plenty to keep you fed and watered, and I was pleased to see the bars stocked Arran beers and a range of malt whisky too, keeping the scottish connections well alive. The lower deck bar must be unique in that it spans the space between the paddles, with portholes along the waterline which give a strange view of the thrashing water outside.
The engines are on full display to the public, just like they used to be, and you can almost reach out and touch the pistons as they turn the two paddle wheels.
Outside the Essex coast was zooming past at an impressive speed and we made our way through much larger ships on the esturary, arriving at Tilbury pier to drop off a few passengers and even pick up a couple. I’m not sure where the estuary officially ends and the Thames begins, but I was surprised how narrow it actually is, as well as a surprising number of twists and turns – somehow I imagined it to be a straight line to the sea!
The highlights of the 3.5 hour trip were going below the massive QE2 Bridge which carries the M25 high above the river just as the sun was setting, then up through the floodlit Thames Barrier, past the O2 Arena, around Canary Wharf, past the entrance to Limehouse marina (and therefore the canal system) and finally the most amazing spectacle of Tower Bridge opening specially for us. What a fantastic day out this was.
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