Mike Stevens' UK Inland Waterways Pages

TRIP REPORTS : THE FELIS CATUS IIYEARS

FELIS CATUS II IN NORTHERN WATERS, 1998

Part 2 – to the "National" at Salford Quays and the start of the run home.

We resume the story at Chester

Next day I got back to Chester about tea-time. We'd planned to do some cruising, but Orinthia thought otherwise and went walkabout. I chatted with various friends who were moored a bit further up the cut. While barbecuing we became a target for kids dropping stones from the City wall above us.

Saturday brought a dark, rainy morning, so we were in no great hurry to start. I went to buy some new boating shoes, then we set off. The cruising was slow, the weather mixed. We stopped at Chas Harden's boatyard again, this time for a pump-out, then on to an evening mooring a little way above Bunbury locks.

We'd been noticing some feebleness from the domestic battery for a while, and by Sunday morning we'd decided to replace it. So after joining the Middlewich Branch at Barbridge, we stopped at Venetian Marine where we had to wait for the place to open, then Midland Chandlers sold us a new battery and a chap from Venetian Marine fitted it (& only charged us a cup of coffee).

At Middlewich we turned north on the Trent & Mersey. The weather dried up (quite suddenly) just before we got to Anderton, where we moored overnight on the visitor moorings. It stayed sunny for long enough for me to have a photographic stroll round the lift (no visible change since our last visit), then it poured again.

Monday morning brought sunny weather. While at the south end of Preston Brook tunnel, waiting for the tunnel opening time, we rang Hazel Dunford to say we were in the vicinity (we already knew Ray was off boating with other friends). She said she'd meet us en route, which she did at the junction, and showed us the way to their house. We spent a very pleasant couple of hours there with Hazel over a few glasses of wine. Their house and garden are very attractive. We were to see Ray a few days later at Salford.

Carrying on, we were very favourably surprised by our first visit to the cut to Runcorn, which is most attractive. From the present head of navigation I walked down to see what could be found of the old locks: a few bits of stonework and some relevant street and pub names. Then it was back onto the main line of the Bridgewater. Just past Thelwall underbridge we decided that a last countryside mooring for the cats before Manchester was a good idea. We found some good woodland for them to explore.

Early on Tuesday morning we stopped at Lymm for shopping, discovering an excellent free-range butcher, equally good bread & cheese shop (the best cheesy conversation I'd had since our local delicatessen owner retired). A biggish Somerfields. And a gent's outfitters that had pyjamas in my size! But no launderette (hence the need to buy pyjamas).

Soon we were on the move again. By the time we reached Stretford Waters Meeting the weather was worsening steadily, and we tied up in pouring rain at Egerton Narrowboats in Castlefield. They provided us with gas, coal, water, elsan disposal & pump-out but unfortunately not rubbish disposal. An old friend, Roger Lane on nb Onward was also there and set off a bit before us.

As we arrived at Pomona Junction (where a deep new lock connects the Bridgewater to the Manchester Ship Canal), Onward was about to enter the lock, so we locked down with him. The lock was staffed by Manchester Ship Canal employees. Down the dock and along a bit of the Ship Canal, we came to Welland Lock, the entrance to Salford Quays, which is part of the old Manchester Docks refurbished by Salford City Council as a Northern equivalent of Canary Wharf. We had to wait for the lock to be available. There is an air-bubble curtain in front of the lock to keep out floating debris, but they were fishing it out with nets as well.

Then we were into the Quays and found our Festival mooring end-on to what the boaters had christened "Mulberry Harbour": a line of pontoons running from a bridge crossing basin to one end of it. It was a very convenient mooring, with 5 minutes walk in one direction to my newsletter office and 3 minutes in the other to the beer tent.

The next few days were spent getting ready for and then taking part in the National Waterways Festival. I was working, as usual, as editor of the daily newsletter (which went quite smoothly that year: for once none of the equipment died). My cousin Barbara stayed on board for a couple of days. Tilly fell in one night and appears to have got herself out (or at least nobody claimed to have helped her). Orinthia went on a walkabout for 24 hours plus, and all departing boats were asked to check for a stowaway! We saw quite a bit of Ray Dunford, who was staying on Mike & Marion West's Cromdale a few boats away from us on the moorings. He'd arrived on that, gone home, and re-appeared with Dorothy Robbie and Libby Bradshaw on Dorothy's boat Tarn. I joined a bit of a gathering one lunchtime with friends from the canals Internet mailing list.

Monday was the last day of the Festival, when I published the last issue of the newsletter and got a chance to see the rest of the show. Then we set off for the return trip. All the early lockings on Tuesday were already booked by the time I went to book us out, so we were given the last locking on Monday. There was a convoy going up the Rochdale & Aston next morning, so we decided to join them at Castlefield.

In overcast conditions we found ourselves waiting some time at Welland Lock, where there was some uncertainty just which boats were supposed to be locking through with us. They told us "But we should get you all through Pomona lock before dark!" When we arrived at the latter, we found 3 or 4 lock-fulls of boats waiting to lock through. The problem seemed to be that Welland Lock will take three narrowboats and Pomona only two, and the waterspace team had been over-optimistic how many lockings they would get through per hour.

It was well after dark by the time we got into the lock, sharing with nb Bart from the Leeds & Liverpool Canal. We soon moored with Bart in one of the side-basins at Castlefield. I went for an exploratory walk in the dark. The notice of the bottom lock of the Rochdale is not very credible about opening times: it's been altered so many times that you wonder if the last change visible is still the real information.

Next morning we joined in the convoy up the Rochdale Nine, which saved us some of the fiddling with anti-vandal locks. The flight was very messy with rubbish from the previous day's "Gay Mardi Gras" festival, including huge rafts of empty lager cans floating in the cut.

Just before the third or fourth lock from the top, the boat came to a halt with something on the blade. It was in the stretch with no towpath, and Wendy had dropped me at the foot of the lock and then backed off, when everything stopped. so Wendy had to pole the boat to where I could catch a rope. We pulled into the lock and started trying to clear the blade while rising up it. The "something" proved to be a blanket which resist all efforts at cutting it. We were still there when the next pair of boats caught up with us. David Lichfield from nb Kew helped us pull out of the lock. There was still to towpath, so we moored the stern to the one bollard in sight and I hung onto a wall at the bow while Wendy struggled with the blanket. By the time Kew and her partner had risen up the lock, we were still there, and David helped Wendy get the blanket off. So we went up the last few locks on our own.

The top lock is kept padlocked. One pays one's fee at the office, and then the car-park attendant lends one the key to the padlock. As Jeff Dennison and Benny Graham sing:

(Since then, with a change of ownership, the fee for the Rochdale Nine has been abolished.)

We met a young man here who offered to help us through the locks on the Ashton, but we'd decided to stop for brunch, so declined his offer. It was now tipping down with rain, so we tied up before the first lock. After that, our young friend was still around, and this time we accepted his offer to help us at the locks. He seemed very pleasant, but appeared to have some sort of learning difficulty. We stopped at Ancoats BW depot to take on water & get rid of rubbish. Our friend stayed with us for about half the locks on the Ashton.

Later the rain stopped and we had fleeting conversations with some pleasant people walking the towpath. We saw no sign of the legendary vandals on this stretch, and later a local boater said they've moved on to other pastimes: dropping things off bridges onto motorways. We found a bit of grass to moor to in one corner of the basin at Fairfield junction, fairly near the sanitary station (which we used). Orinthia was hunting waterfowl. Both cats fell in during the night, but got themselves out OK.

On Wednesday we made a leisurely start in showery weather, through Dukinfield junction and on to the Peak Forest Canal. We stopped at Warble narrowboats, hoping for a pump-out but their machine was out of order. We learnt that there is a launderette in Dukinfield but (a) it's a long way from the cut and (b) we'd already passed the best point for access to it.

Marple locks were as beautiful as ever, but we found them quite hard work. Past Marple junction there was very poor depth at the visitor moorings, but a passing local boater recommended a spot on the offside, which proved to be fine. Nice and woody for the cats. Tilly took to beating up wild mint. We barbecued again, glad to be somewhere where this was possible.

Next morning we had thought of shopping in Marple, but the mooring was quite a long way past the best access point, so we decided go on to Whaley Bridge instead in the hope of a pump-out.

A bit of odd manoeuvring at Turflea swing bridge was caused by a boat coming the other way leaving the bridge open with nobody to close it. So I had to be put ashore on the off-side. Because of this, we picked up a tyre on the blade that would not budge. We tried bow-hauling for a while, but the shallows and reedy banks made it thoroughly unproductive, so we decided to wait for another boat and scrounge a tow. Eventually somebody turned up and we set off cross-strapped, as far as New Mill Boatyard, which is now an Anglo-Welsh operation. We gave our rescuers a bottle of wine for their trouble. One of the boatyard chaps wrestled the tyre off the blade with his bare hands (bear hands?) in a couple of minutes. We had a pump-out and filled up with diesel, as the latter was at a very good price.

A few minutes after starting again, at Bank End bridge Orinthia leapt ashore in the bridgehole. I followed, but she stayed teasingly just out of reach beyond a barbed wire fence, with a large field behind her across which she might well have run had I tried to climb through the fence and grab her. Eventually Wendy managed to tie the boat to a fence and came with a tin of mogginosh to tempt Orinthia back. Rarely fails!

We moored overnight just past Bugsworth junction in the old main line (a.k.a. Bugsworth arm). I had a look at the basins: some visible progress in restoration since our last visit. The entrance canal is now in water, and rumour had it that the basins would be soon. Wendy also went for a walk and Tilly followed her for a while, then went off on her own, returning much later. A good sign of her growing confidence. Later still, Orinthia came in after another ducking and monopolised Wendy's pillow to sort herself out.

On Friday we set off round the corner to Whaley Bridge, where we found no room to moor, so we winded without stopping. We needed rubbish disposal, elsan & water, so planned to do those at Marple. A couple of hotel boats were on the loo point moorings there, but were happy for us to moor outboard of them and were helpful. The tap was s - l - o - w.

Off again just before noon, we found good depth on the first stretch of the Macclesfield. We had heard it was being dredged, and eventually passed three sites where dredging was actually in progress. Quite fun getting past some of them. We got into a "hearse-race" behind nb Willow at one point, but they resumed a normal speed later: I guess they'd found a shallow patch (they're an ex-working boat so presumably deep draught). We passed them when they stopped to get ice-creams.

We moored overnight near the last bridge before Bosley locks, next to a nice hedgerow for the cats to go hunting in. One mouse escaped under its own steam and another was rescued using the humane mousetrap we keep for the purpose.

Saturday was due to be our last day aboard for this trip. The lock-pounds in the Bosley flight were all well above weir. By mid-morning we were making much better time than expected (it was nothing like as shallow as we remembered this cut), so decided to press on rather than trying for a mooring at either Heritage Boats or David Piper's. I rang Stoke-on-Trent Boatbuilders at Longport Wharf, who were happy to accommodate us. We had quite a wait for Harecastle tunnel before going through it in the middle of a convoy. We reached Longport at 3:30 pm and tied up outside a rather nice Roger Fuller tug, whence we departed for home.