On the way into Stoke I spotted a boatyard that wasn't shy about diversification:
'Tacle [sic] & Bait Air Guns Boats & Engines Country & Western Line Dancing'
The Caldon winds out of the Stoke area - another shallow, slow canal, but lots of corners you have no idea what's around... hero had been one lock ahead of me on the way up to Etruria & the first few locks, but they waved me past later, struggling with draft. Not only is it shallow anyway, but appears to be low anyway - one pound between locks was very low, I filled it a few inches after leaving the lock and grounding as I pulled in to do the next one.
I'd been warned about the lift bridges - one walking couple offered to do one for me, but the next was down to me. They're hydraulic ones operated with a windlass, so not counterbalanced well enough to be lifted by heand and held up with a pole. Instead I took the boat close, crossed & lifted, and pulled the boat past by hand. Worked on this one, but may not always.
Tomorrow - up to Leek (somewhere that has to be visited, not least from childhood railway reading about the Leek & Manifold Railway), then back down towards Froghall, the end of the canal. There's some respectable contour lines on the map, I'm looking forward to them a lot.
2 comments:
I enjoy your blog as I do may other NBers but wish you'd look into adding a RSS feed so I can use my google reader and get your new post automatically. Anyways, keep writing.
Are you really Andrew Denny in disguise? He thinks absolutely everyone shoudl have an RSS feed. ;-)
Thanks. though - to be honest I wrote it as my own record, anyone else reading it is almost co-incidental. ;-)It's a bog standard free 'blogger' job, I'm afraid, so if the Atom feed linked at the bottom of the page isn't sufficient, I may not be able to help. I'm a geek, but not a web one...
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