So, this is how the birds repay us for putting our bird feeder up whenever we moor!!! Thank goodness these crows didn’t add to the roof too.
We moored in a super spot opposite one of the salt flashes, near Northwich. These occurred when salt mines collapsed & filled with water. It was lovely to watch a family of grebes feeding.
This handsome chappie strolled along to hoover up under the bird feeder, which had been very busy with tits.
Once again, we were very excited to spot a kingfisher really close, on the boat moored in front. We showed the photo to the holidaymakers on the hire boat, who really weren’t interested at all!!!
There were some stunning
sunsets over the vast expanse of water at the flash.
There are three tunnels quite near to each other on this stretch of the Trent & Mersey Canal. There's always light at the end and a sign to tell you when you’re halfway.
Two of the tunnels have time restrictions, you can only enter within a certain time frame, e.g. on the hour for 10 mins. One of the tunnels is left to guess work, southbound it’s at an awkward angle, so we approached slowly, I was on the bow and could hear this boat coming, so we moored and waited. I think we need to remember though, there are lots of silent, battery powered boats on the network and a peek into the tunnel mouth at this particular tunnel is essential.
There was a substantial landslide near Anderton during the winter. There is now a narrow channel marked with buoys for boats to use. We chatted to one of the people that lived in Barnton, the village above the slide, they lost their gas & broadband connections for a considerable time!!
It appears there’s a shortage of Calor gas in the NW, our cylinders usually last about 9 weeks, and we put this one on a couple of weeks ago, so have until mid-August with it. The weather has been perfect for BBQing, and we’re using up our camping gas cylinders that must be getting on for 10 years old with our tiny alpine stove (perfect when we did motorcycle camps) to boil the kettle. Fingers crossed we can replace our empty 13 kg cylinder soon.
We dyed a couple of kg of wool (before we knew about the gas shortage!) at the flash as the towpath was nice & wide, with very few passers-by.
John harvested some nettles (brave lad) for natural dyeing and along with our favourite onion skins got some great colours.
Fibre dyed with acid dyes.
We had a wonderful weekend with our longest boating friends Ruth & Chris on nb Mad Hatter. They’d planned to travel back to the southern Grand Union Canal via Manchester, but one of the locks was out of action, so they had to travel along the Trent & Mersey Canal. It was wonderful to catch up and maybe we shouldn’t have sat out on the towpath until the wee hours.
They spent a day on the River Weaver before heading off. John took lots of photos of them travelling in the Anderton Boat Lift. The following day, the boat lift was out of action for planned repairs for a few weeks.
The towpath at Anderton is pretty busy with people visiting the visitor centre at the boat lift. We took advantage of this and opened Jubilee Fibres, which was hugely successful, and we’ve almost sold out of dyed wool, John’s woven items and my knitted things.
