Fran's Pictures

Dad finally gets round to opening the CD of pictures of the narrow boating holiday sent to us by Fran and Commander Dave. Like us, they spent the holiday with disabled cameras so we were all struggling to get some decent pics, using camcorders on single shot etc, but there are some good ones in here. Thanks for that Fran and Dave - hope you're keeping well. I have also emailed a selection off to the Silverwoods. I love the one of their entire family as they emerge from Standedge Tunnel. Brilliant.

After heavy rain overnight Dad nips down to the barge to see if anything is dripping through and is pleased to note all the through-deck leaks are now cured by a combination of his and Richard's painting, plus Shipwright John's re-caulking. The couple of tiny leaks remaining are not through decks, but rather at joins between, for example, skylight and deck. They will need some other kind of fix.

Dad must also provision up for Mum's Birthday meal tomorrow. The deal is the Birthday girl or boy gets to choose the stylee of eating, restaurant or home, and Mum rather fancies Dad cook a spectacliar for the two of them plus Diamond and John, so Dad's had to nip off in search of 'spectacliar' ingredients. No pressure. One cause of stress which has gone away, though, Amazon have just managed to sneak in delivery of part of the present. They'd been running a bit close to the wire, with the big day being tomorrow.

Now, as I write this at 11:30, the skies are finally clearing and the sun is breaking through so I expect we'll get to go out for our walk soon.

Deefs

Falling Royd Tunnel

Days 2 and 3 of the narrow boating saga and the adventure begins in earnest. Our first choice to do the Pennine Ring of canals clockwise is thwarted by a broken lock cill (more accurately the threshold of the cill) near Huddersfield which will have closed the canal just when we wanted to ascend through it, so we are on plan B, the same route anticlockwise. We must ascend to the summit of the Rochdale canal where we are booked through on Thursday.

But first, let me introduce young Maxwell who readers nwill have only seen as a small ball of white fluff curled up among the cats at Steak Lady's abode. Look at him now - a fine figure of a man at only 7 months old, almost the same size as me. That's him on the right. He's good fun and great company, all be it I have to shout at him now and again when he gets a bit too uppity or tries to take over my Dad's lap or his bit of the seats. Green Eye? Moi?

Here too, we meet two human characters and another dog, who will be very much part of this circumnavigation. "Commander Dave" and his wife Fran, plus collie cross Bonnie are in a baby-sister ship the "Oxford" and are doing the same route as us with the same bookings through pinch points, so the rules are we should pair up through locks to save water. It is brilliant, in these cases, if the paired boat crew are good, nice people as you are going to spend a fair amount of time with them and co-operate. Conversely it is a real pain if they are incompatible, as we have seen in the past but superbly, this time, we get lucky and Dave and Fran are great fun, easy to work with, a lovely couple, and we dogs quickly get on with Bonnie, who is a natural at hopping on and off boats and nipping round locks, bridges, towpaths etc.

So, on Tuesday we leave Brearly and chug gently upwards in good weather through Mytholmroyd (where Dad is proud to have not hit anything in the first big helming challenge, Falling Royd Tunnel - from blazing sun to pitch black just as the canal, in the dark does 4 turns inside the narrow tunnel!) and Hebden Bridge as far as Todmorden, where we moor by the "Great Wall". On Wednesday we move on again up through Gauxholm to the pre-summit pound from where we can walk back to the famous Grandma Pollards chippie (an annual treat).

This pond is very low, with great dry mud banks either side on top of one of which is perched a cruiser completely high and dry. We plough the mud and manage to get our bow against the bank so that we can get on and off, but the stern has to sit out mid channel on a long rope and we all sleep the night at a rather jaunty angle, bows high and listing considerably to port!

At one stage both Maxwell and Bonnie try swimming for a laugh, Max lepping unseen from the back deck into a lock so that Dad, helming, is only aware of his going from the sploosh noise, but can quickly wrangle him back onto the deck, grabbing him by the collar - no harm done. Bonnie does hers trying to leap from boat to boat and we all see her go.

Lucky we brought dog towels

Deefs

Kess and a rescue

An eventful day. Dad is down at the Cambria where they are now back into real volunteer-work, after almost 12 months where "volunteer work" has meant manning the volunteer centre and explaining the project to the public. Today the boys are glad to get back into overalls and rigger boots, gloved up to paint really black sticky paint onto the rolled-steel "keelson" girder which will run the length of the barge along the midline, bolted to the floor. We dogs are not allowed anywhere near, although barge-dog Kess (we've mentioned her before in this blog) gets herself into a pic looking particularly demented, with a nice out-of-focus bargey background.

At one stage Dad has to rescue another Jack Russel (Fran) from the creek. It's high tide and Fran is playing with a ball a bit near the edge, when she puts the ball down on the slope and it rolls in. Plop! Fran is most concerned at this and slithers down the bank to rescue it, and falls in too. Splosh! She grabs the ball and turns back for the bank, but the sides are steep and muddy, and she can't get a grip. The owner starts to fret, so Dad clambers down the quay-side woodwork and hoiks her out by the harness. She is wet, cold and shaken but not harmed. Muppet. (Not clear if Dad's talking about the owner here, or the dog).

Also, for good measure, an nice pic of an orchid which the humans have TLC'd back into flower after we all thought it was a goner. And one of the three of us on the early morning bed, where we have romped and play-fought till it was no longer possible for the humans to relax and read the papers. This shows the H (left), the Megster (centre) and my good self (r).

Hope you had a good weekend

Deefski