Mum Driving into a lock on the Marple flight
I rarely resort to an umbrella, but it was chucking it down.
A tiring day as much of it was done in the rain. As I mentioned before, it’s been a cold week. Each day the forecast temperature has been lower than the previous one. Despite that we had a very enjoyable day as (Susie’s) Mum and our friend Alastair joined us for the day.
We met at Braidbar boats in High Poynton and after a cup of tea, set off for Marple Junction.
We did stop for lunch and to water up before starting the Marple flight. We started that around 2pm and finished at 6.30pm. We couldn’t have done them any faster as we only had to turn 1 and thanks to Mum and Alastair joining us, we had enough people to send an advance party to prepare each lock and everyone had a turn at doing everything.
Marple locks are a game of 2 halves, the top half runs alongside the streets of Marple and includes some very lovely gardens.
The bottom 8 locks are in a much more countrified setting
The danger of a spinning windlass
I had a very nasty moment when in the wet my hand slipped off the windlass as I was winding down one of the paddles. Although I was holding the safety catch, I wasn’t quick enough at dropping it to stop the windlass spinning and my arm was badly bruised from the beating it received. I was very, very lucky not to have been an ambulance case with a broken arm.
We dropped of Mum and Alastair near Hyde railway station, pulling up outside a row of houses. The lady in number 4 very kindly called us a taxi which saved a lot of effort.
We would have stayed there overnight but I couldn’t find anywhere where I could hammer in a mooring pin. The bank side path looked grassy but was solid stone from about 3 inches down.
After another couple of hours cruising looking for the nearest mooring point, we gave up and moored on the landing of the lift bridge just before we were due to join the Huddersfield narrow. By this time it was 9.10, pitch dark and we were both very cold and tired.
According to the CRT man we met the following day, if we’d have gone through the swing bridge and traveled another 300 yards there were about 100 mooring rings we could have used.
Time and Distance:
4.5 miles on the Macclesfield canal before turning onto the peak forest canal. 7.25 miles on the peak forest including the 16 lock Marple flight.
11.75 + 16 = 28 9.3 hours.
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