THURSDAY 20TH MAY
Leaving Mike, Jo, Mo and Vanessa to their travels towards Chester; we attempted to slip away quietly at 7am. Mike waved us goodbye from the hatch; apparently they were awake already, so our start had been fairly quiet!
The sun was bright, a cloudless sky, another reminder of why we like starting early, you seem to catch the best of the weather. Hopefully the weather lore saying 'dry before 7, wet before 11' will ignore us for today. (Yes I know, there should be high cloud visible for the saying to hold good). We turned onto the Middlewich arm and saw nothing moving until Church Minshull, when a boat moved off in our direction, and three came the other way.
Arriving at Wardle lock, Myra stopped to chat to Maureen as we waited for one boat in front to drop in the lock. We filled with diesel from Kings lock chandlery (78p - self declare) and fish and chips from the chippy.
After lunch, the three Middlewich locks took no time with Myra steering, the bottom paddles were as stiff as I had remembered. At big lock, there were four BW men, three in uniform and one in shirtsleeves, who was the engineer; and was also a nice friendly man. A long chat ensued and eventually when their boat cleard the lock, we entered, one of the others helped Myra with the gates and paddles.
Soon we were tying up at Croxton Flash, for a short run tomorrow to the lift at Anderton. Later, the sound of a boat engine revving loudly brought both of us to the windows. A hire boat from Andersen boats had misjudged the turn and gone aground in the flash. I was able to throw a rope to them and pull the back end to the towpath with the assistance of a lot of revs in reverse. Having turned the boat around for them, they went back towards Middlewich with lots of waving of arms and relieved expressions.
