Today’s journey can be found here:
A much nicer day for boating today, although the winds are still high, at least it looked to be mostly dry. I noticed now it wasn’t raining that we had moored right next to a field of alpacas and right by the Wedgewood factory, amazing!
We set off and soon passed the steam boat from earlier in the journey ‘Emily-Anne’. It is quite nice when you pass boats you’ve seen before, a gentle familiarity to their wave of ‘Hello’. It amuses me when you get the opposite of people you know you have passed lots but they don’t acknowledge you or blatantly ignore you. I always find myself thinking back to a Mickey Flanagan sketch of awkward neighbourly hello’s after the second or third time of bumping into them:
We came up against a CRT work boat who were out trimming some of the tree branches that are now in the way of the navigation. They kindly pulled over and let us past.
The water was so much calmer today and I kept seeing these lovely reflection shots:
A lovely amble took us through Stone and down some easy locks (just behind our hirer friends). The hovering was a little harder today as the canal itself seemed to have quite a flow on it. A little work boat popped out of the lock ahead, they look so funny those little boats but they do a lot of work around the network.
Above, a couple of lock pictures, a submerged motorbike, passing Stone Brewery, some impromptu wooden lady sculpture and a mini narrowboat on the road next to a lock announcing the entrance to Stone.
Richard insisted on working the locks again today but I got to test my injury by doing some ropework with the boat and it seems to be a lot better so maybe locks again for me soon! Pulled into Aston Marina as we’d heard it was the best price for diesel on the route we are going. 57p a litre, perfect. You still have to do the split of domestic Vs propulsion and pay the extra tax on the Propulsion part but still works out cheaper than normal diesel. Aston Marina is another sister marina to my home mooring, not bad it would seem on first glance.
A short distance down from the marina we pulled over for the night. I was mesmerised by the skys reflections in the water there, looked like we were floating on the sky! I couldn’t capture it but the moon looked amazing tonight, so low and big with a perfect reflection.
That Niggling Thought 