Washed in the Calder, Dried in the Aire

Monday - and another hard-charging day. There is a chunk in Leeds where due to the risk of vandalism (mainly the local Herberts leaving lock-paddles open, to drain the lock pounds and ground the boats - har har... very funny I'm sure!) the British Waterways officials lock everything up at 15:30pm overnight, so if you're not into this stretch by 1pm, you have to wait till next morning. The advice is to take Monday gently, moor up at Office Lock in Leeds, and do the restricted bit in the morning.

Mrs Silverwood, however, calculates that if we toe it, we might just sneak through, so we're under instructions to go-go-go, grabbing food and coffee on the hoof, as we steam on through the Aire and Calder Navigation, turning North at Wakefield and up towards Castleford and Leeds.

The Calder and the Aire are good wide genuine rivers (my 1st picture) and we can get a bit of speed on (I'm talking about "just faster than walking pace" here, so don't get a picture of speedboats with creaming wakes in your head!) and the Rivers are alive with swans, ducks, grebes, kingfishers, even cormorants and terns (!) plus we've seen 2 mink.

We must turn left at the traffic lights (I kid you not) just West of Castleford; it's here we join the Aire (upstream) so from now, till the summit, all the locks are "uphill", and many are big and mechanised (so the Lock-Wrangling team are reduced to pushing buttons).

We power on through Woodlesford and Stourton, having come out of the river at Lemonroyd Lock, and chug gently into Leeds - boating through the town centre is really bizarre, and we smile and wave (or woof) at the suited office workers chatting in plazas or eating sandwiches on benches overlooking our canal.

However, we don't make the cut-off for the restricted bit, so we end up moored in Office Lock pound, stopping the night in a safe, but not very promising looking Waterways compound with a strip of grass for dog exercise, bordered by a derilect warehouse, a huge railway bridge and a tower crane building a new sky scraper (and the canal of course). Of course we have keys to get out through the "handcuff" locks, but no-one can get in.

More tomorrow

Deefski