The Canal Boat

September 4 – 11, 2023

Our canal boat adventure has come to a close. Because of limited WiFi along the way, I’ll condense the trip to one longer post.

We got a sneak peak of our boat last Monday morning when it came in from its earlier renter. 

We spent the morning walking to several grocery stores in Middlewich to assess where best to buy our food for the week. We knew there might be pubs along the way but wanted to have food on hand for breakfasts and at least some other meals. We finished our paperwork with Andersen Boats at 2:30pm and headed out to our first locks with the guidance of Andersen personnel. Norman’s original plan was for me to steer the boat while her worked the locks. The first 3 locks are in a row and pretty easy. The Andersen folks wished us well and abandoned us. Lock number 4 was a doozy, a sharp right turn under a bridge and into the lock. The canal passes through a shipyard and public boat dock between numbers 3 and 4. It wasn’t so simple anymore! It was a nightmare.

After one more lock, I was ready to jump off the boat. We found a place to moor for the night (and decompress). 

I decided I would rather do the manual labor of opening the locks than the driving through them. We changed jobs. Part of me was ready to go back and quit, but I couldn’t bear the thought of lock number 4 coming up so quickly again.

The new arrangement worked. I sweated like a pig in the warm spell England is having, but I didn’t have the stress of fitting the long, barrow boat in the slender locks. On Tuesday, we made good time and went through 3 more locks. 

We tied up for the night with the expectation that we’d reach the far point of our journey the next day. We also met a lovely couple (actually, Norman gave their boat a little bump with our boat) who shared some wisdom that was very helpful. And, they said that everyone had been a beginner once. (Cars of new drivers here have a big letter “N” in their windows; we needed one of those for the boat.)

Wednesday went pretty smoothly. We survived a double lock (three gates in a row instead of the usual 2) and 4 singles. We tied up in Christleton so we could take the bus to Chester on Thursday. We decided not to take the boat into Chester with its 7 more locks. We enjoyed our day of leisure and lunch at a local pub.

So, if you’ve been counting, you’ll know we have those same 13 locks to go through on the return voyage.  I was happy to count down the ones remaining. We felt a bit more confident, but we still had trouble with almost every docking. It was still difficult to let me off the boat to go work the locks. We made one turn on the outward trip where Norman ran into the wall of the canal; we didn’t repeat that which made us happy.

We saw some beautiful old country houses, green pastures with cattle or sheep, fields of corn, an 

old castle off in the distance, more canal boats than we could keep track of, and millions of blackberries (definitely not an exaggeration, I think I could make blackberry jelly for everyone in the United States). 

Both ducks and swans were at the stage of getting their adult plumage. 

It was fun to see mallard drakes with partially green heads. We saw men fishing in the canals with poles long enough to reach the far bank – and they said they would never eat anything out of the canal. The ones we saw catch anything, had hooked what looked like large minnows, but the fishermen sat along the canal for hours.

Living on the boat would have been much more pleasant in cooler weather. The windows don’t have screens so bugs are annoying, especially at night when we had a light on inside. The small kitchen was adequate as was the mini-fridge until it stopped working (not a big deal as we were back at Andersen’s dock, though our remaining ice cream is soup). The bathroom is okay; the shower is actually quite nice and better than the one my parents had on the boat they lived aboard. Would we do this again? It’s probably too early to make that decision, but we are glad we finished the week.

And a few more pictures along the way - 

We’re off to Norway!