A blur crossed my peripheral vision as I closed the lock gate behind Mary Joan. It was Indy, a German Shepherd-Collie crossbreed bounding at full speed. She is owned by Tracy, the proprietor of Clayways,  where I’d continued to learn about pottery making while the boat was moored in Swanley Bridge Marina near Nantwich during ….  Read More

Water was streaming over the tops of the upper gates of Lock 92 of the “Rochdale Nine”. A lock flight that takes you eastwards into central Manchester. I decided that although I had friends joining me the following day to provide help with the locks, someone with local knowledge would be needed in this instance. ….  Read More

Last autumn, the only marina within a twenty-mile radius of central Liverpool, in the northern sector, with available moorings, was Scarisbrick Marina, so that is where I spent the last winter. Googling the options for a creative diversion, I came upon the ArtsLoft in Southport, which offered life drawing and pottery classes. A Thursday routine ….  Read More

It is never pleasant to be told that your services are no longer required. This happened to a volunteer lock keeper on the Wigan Lock Flight. Details of the incident are sketchy, but it seems someone fell into a lock while being helped by at least one off duty volunteer and the circumstances were such ….  Read More

My guest canal blog by Andrew Kay (age 62 and a half) Nick has been Doog since about the age of 14. He isn’t a Nick at all really. Why? Here is a photo of Doog’s hair at the age of 14. So, Doog invited me to stay on his boat for a couple of ….  Read More

Rub-a-dub-dub, Three men in a tub, And who do you think they be? The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker, And all of them out to sea. I created the image above using Microsoft’s artificial intelligence chatbot Copilot. I had intended to use the photograph below as a starting point for the processing. The photograph ….  Read More

A short train ride from my mooring at Thorne South to Doncaster Station, plus an hour’s walk, brought me to the South Yorkshire Aircraft Museum. Google had informed me that the museum was “busier than usual”, so I wondered if I’d get a table in the café. As it turned out, for the first hour, ….  Read More

After three winters on the waterways as a continuous cruiser I’ve shifted (temporarily) to the soft life of a marina with its electric hook-up. I’d intended spending the winter on the Chesterfield Canal, but six hours along it, the boat went aground in the centre of the canal, churning up mud and weeds. The draught ….  Read More

The lock lights had just turned green, and Steve was undoing his bowline, preparing to cast off from the pontoon and pass through Torksey Lock. I noticed that his stern was drifting away from the pontoon so reached out and grabbed one of his fender cords. I’d not noticed that the fender was only attached ….  Read More

With a pint of lager in mind, I walked along the towpath towards the New Inn, which lies at the junction of the Leicester and Birmingham branches of the Grand Union Canal. It wasn’t the breadth of the beer-belly on the guy who stood on the towpath that drew my attention, but the amount of ….  Read More