What can I say, this year is becoming rather too eventful for my liking!

 

At the start of September we spent a few days in Barlaston and then stayed in Stone for a week. Finally we headed off for a bit of peace and quiet in the countryside….. except …. Ian soon discovered that we had a problem, he spotted, what he thought was, oil in the engine coolant. So instead of relaxing we ended up limping the boat gently to a spot closer to a main road. After several phone calls, he managed to find an engineer to come and assess the damage. The resulting temporary fix added pipe work to prevent the gearbox oil from leaking into the coolant and several plans were suggested for a permanent fix. Our Beta Marine engine is now 28 years old and the later models have had a redesign to prevent this problem from happening. So it was going to be a bit of a “bodge job” as those parts won’t fit our engine. Ian later worked out that there wasn’t oil in the coolant or water in the gearbox. It looks like there is some corrosion of the oil cooler but it’s ok right now. The 28 year old oil cooler pipes are now stiff and brittle and with all the messing about, one developed a small leak. So we now have some new oil cooler pipes. 

Happy with our fix, we moved off to Great Haywood to use the service point and then onto Tixall Wide. This is a busy junction, it’s the meeting of the Trent & Mersersy and the Staffordshire & Worcestershire Canals but there’s also a hire boat company, a service point and popular moorings for the nearby cafe and farm shop. So there was absolute chaos with boats going every which way trying to hold their position and wait their turn to either pull in for water, make the turn at the junction or to get past everyone who was waiting. It was a huge relief to get on to Tixall Wide and find plenty of space to moor up.

It’s always a bit of fun here. There’s normally plenty of friendly boaters and towpath users as it’s quite picturesque and close to Shugborough Hall. This time there was a bit of a buzz with numerous twitchers wandering around pointing big lenses into the meadow beside us looking for a Marsh Harrier. There’d been a reported sighting of one the previous day, we’d seen Hen Harriers on Uist a few months earlier, so it would be nice to spy a different Harrier. Sadly, it wasn’t to be, but I was chuffed with watching Kingfishers and Kestrels. 

We did get our relaxing week, and started to feel quite chilled out. That was until we started phoning around to find a marina to leave the boat in during a trip we have planned for December.  Unfortunately for us, due to the water shortages, a large majority of boaters had opted not to do any cruising this summer and retained their mooring or had got stranded in this area, so all the marinas were already full for the winter. Then out of the blue, a stroke of luck (makes a change!). CRT announced that the lock at Gloucester that had been shut all summer due to low water on the Severn was going to be opened every weekend from the middle of September. We made a quick call to a marina on the Gloucester and Sharpness who have promised to squeeze us in…if we can get there before the River Severn goes into flood it’s only 97 miles, 48 locks and 9 moveable bridges away!

After all the low-water driven changes to our plans this year, it’s remarkable that our original plan for the coming winter is back on the cards.

But that mission will have to wait, right now there are other plans afoot, the boat is tied up in a different marina and we’ve headed off on a new adventure…more of that to follow!