Back to Stoke

The weather looked much better this morning so we set off at 9:00, turned round and headed back home. We were originally going to travel a bit further up the Macclesfield Canal but the wind was strong and cold. Boating in a strong wind is arguably less fun than boating in the rain as the shape of a narrowboat makes it very sensitive to cross-winds. In extreme circumstances they can blow a 15ton boat from one side of the canal to the other with little the driver can do about it.

Luckily things weren't that bad today. Without too much difficulty we reached our previous overnight mooring point at Red Bull Aqueduct in time for lunch and a quick repeat visit to Tesco.

Dredging on the Macclesfield

On our journey we passed a floating digger dredging the canal. This nowadays is an all too rare sight as funding cuts have reduced canal maintenance to the minimum. The driver instructed us to pass by very close to the digger as the sides of the canal were extremely shallow. He told us that at one point the water was only 1 foot deep. He couldn't dredge that area because he had met puddled clay - the original waterproof liner for the canal channel.

After a quick lunch we passed through the Harecastle tunnel, again being allowed to enter almost immediately after arriving. We have moored a mile south of the tunnel at Westport Park Lake, an area created by mining subsidence which has been landscaped and provided with a Staffordshire Naturalists Trust visitor centre.