It rained very hard all night, loud enough on the roof to wake us several times, and it was forecast to carry on all day. We got ourselves organised and we were just feeding the dogs when a walker passing by mentioned that a boater around the corner was having trouble with the swing bridge, he couldn’t open it. As we were going to have to go that way, I walked down the towpath to see what was up.
I found a man and his wife, on the narrowboat Northgate. The bridge was
jammed because the rain had washed a whole lot of gravel and small stones down
the lane, and into the curved groove between the bridge body and the stone rim.
This meant that we could not rotate the bridge, it wouldn’t budge. The man had
already started to scrape and lever the stones out, using a screwdriver, but
the gap was much deeper than the length of the screwdriver, and many of the
stones seemed stuck fast anyway.
I went back to our boat to see if I could find anything longer, but the
only item I found, a brush handle, was too wide to go into the slot. At that
point I called CRT, who said someone would be along, and we went back to
scraping.
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| The offending bridge (after fixing) |
Over time we were joined by other boaters, and the CRT people came. They
had a couple of long thin metal fence poles, the sort that have a loop at one
end to take cord or wire, and we started prodding and scraping with them – they
were at least long enough, but it was still tedious work. They went off to see
if they could find a pressure hose, and our small but growing team continued –
one guy found a bucket and start to use that to wash away the smaller stuff,
which allowed the rest of us to see and move the bigger bits more easily. After
about three hours chipping away like the Seven Dwarves we had got out enough
stones to allow us to shift the thing, and we were on our way. In the end it
was fun in an odd sense, like the challenges you get on a management
training course – "with this limited choice of tools your team has to achieve
the following objectives".
 |
| The start of the Macc |
The rain hadn’t been too bad, but it picked up as we sailed back to
Marple, and stopped to replenish our water. We only did that yesterday, but
Loulie had done several loads of washing in the meantime. She got the machine, a
little single tub, before this trip, so that we can be self-sustaining on
longer journeys. She has to intervene manually more often than she does at home,
but it works well, though it does use up a lot of our water.
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| Goyt Mill in Marple |
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| Navigating in the pouring rain |
When the water had been refilled we set off down the Macclesfield Canal,
past a really large old building, Goyt Mill, the biggest we have seen since
Manchester. It was really torrential now, and we were looking for a place to
stop, but this is a busy canal with a lot of people moored in the good spots,
and quite a bit of the towpath wall is collapsing, so you cannot moor. We went
about four miles, through High Lane, and then in Higher Poynton we found a very
nice mooring, with no-one close and shuttering to attach the mooring pins to.
The only downside is that we have very poor internet signal, so I am writing
this up offline to be posted when we reach civilisation.
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| Map at 28-7-19 |
TODAY: 4.75
HOURS. 6.9 MILES. 0 LOCKS. 2 BRIDGEs.
VOYAGE: 43.65 HOURS. 57.3
MILES. 43 LOCKS. 6 BRIDGES
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