Day 10 – Let Them Eat Cake…

After our night at the Standedge Visitor Centre we were joined again by Mum and Alastair who arrived in time for Stephanie’s jolly excellent bacon, egg and mushroom sandwiches. A breakfast to set us up for the day  – which was what we needed given the rigours ahead.

As we’d exited the tunnel, our CRT chaperones had explained to us that coming down the into Huddersfield it was very important to fill the lock ahead of the one we were in before emptying the water from our lock.  Basically we were emptying a lock’s worth of water from the pound before we replaced it with the water from the lock we were in. This was to avoid flooding the houses which were beside the towpath.

As we had booked to go through the Guillotine lock at 24E at 3.00pm, it meant that for efficiency (and the fact that most lock landings were too problematic to use), we decided to put one crew member 2 locks ahead to start preparing the lock,  one crew member 1 lock ahead to open the gate once it was full, one driver and one crew to open the bottom gates, drop the paddles and close the gates again. This worked superbly, we had a well oiled machine which rotated through the locks as quickly as possible. This resulted in no flooding and no shallow lock pounds.

Until we caught up with other boats of course at lock 32. Then we grounded and slowed down to a painful crawl.   Having chatted to them at lock 30, they suggested that we should overtake as we were so much faster, however they seemed to change their minds as they proceeded down the locks pretty slowly.  They also didn’t look to be filling the advance lock first, and this is probably why ran aground lots once we’d caught them up – and how come the skipper of the first boat was able to show me a photo of the house who’s garden was newly flooded…

I was not very happy about the possibility of not getting through lock 24E as Mum and Alastair had left a car at 17E and it would have been a long walk down.  I also didn’t want to risk a delay in our arrival at Aspley Wharf.  As we were at back at work on Monday I needed to make sure that the boat was sorted out and an engineer arranged to sort out a few issues which we’d been having throughout the journey. This meant a working hours on Friday arrival would make everything much easier for us.

It was touch and go whether or not we would make out rendezvous with the gentleman from the CRT to get us through what they said was the last remaining hand cranked guillotine lock in the country at Lock 24E.  However, I jogged ahead and met him to assure him we were nearly there.  We finally got through the 24E at 3.30.

After that we definitely needed a cup of tea and reward for our valiant efforts.  So we stopped for half an hour at Slaithwaite moorings (below 22E) for tea and cake from the Handmade Bakery Company’s shop on the canal side by Lock 23E. We enjoyed Apple and Olive oil cake, and Tunisian spiced orange (with spiced syrup), both were absolutely delicious.  We also popped into the Co-op to source dinner.

We had to push on to Titanic Mills at Lock 17, where our hard working and by now pretty knackered crew had left one of their cars this morning. We continued down 1 further lock before mooring for the night where the CRT people had advised.  I moored up and we packed up for the night,  However, after a short while it became apparent that we were grounded with the boat heeled over at quite an angle, so I unpacked again and moved the boat down half onto the lock landing of 15E where we I could rock the boat to check we were floating properly.

The sections of canal that we covered today were extremely pretty and I’m looking forward to seeing them again when we return.

Time and Distance

27 locks, 4.25 miles.

Started at 10.20, finished at 7.00pm, approx 8 hours travelling time.

 

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