The forgotten blog!

 

 

I wrote this blog this time last month when it was so hot and we were melting, then we needed to light the fire a few days later!! Luckily we were moored by a little thicket which offered a wonderfully shady area for the kids to play in. They made a den, while I hooked the Wi-Fi in a tree and joined the weekly Zoom knit & natter.

 We understand the Lathom Fishes were carved out of stone excavated from beside Moss Bridge, 35 on the Leeds & Liverpool Canal as a millennium project. The kids really loved playing on and around them.

A family of 4 ducklings ran to us be fed several times each day. They loved the seed from the bird feeder and came right up to us.

It was lovely to sit out in the evening watching the bats.

We had a super day at Crosby Beach for our son-in-law Dale's 30^th birthday. His parents and their dog were up from the south.

Edmund drove up from London and it was so good to see him.

 

None of the other’s had seen the Anthony Gormley figures before, 100 life-size statues of the sculptor in the nude!!! The ones lower on the beach that are often covered by sea are covered in barnacles.

Everyone collected sea glass & we had lots. The children had fun washing it all & sorting it out.

The wind was blowing at >40mph and we all felt we’d been sand blasted!!

We had a dress rehearsal for Jubilee Fibres, which saw us welcome several customers to our outside shop. It is still tricky to plan when to open. 

Our friends moored behind us and I got to have a little play with her tiny electric spinning wheel.

Now skip on 4 weeks……

And here are few more pictures of what we’ve been up to, but we’ve not travelled very far. Plus now it’s the summer hols we are having such fun with the grandchildren.

Lilly came to visit

Our first pints

Sampler blanket warp

Cygnets can reach in the hatch

our cygnets have grown

Mooring at Sollom

Wine making

Jam tarts soon

Pottery with aunty Ada, beer cans for rolling pins!

Sollom sunset

CRT lads dismantling old Tarleton sea lock gates

At Lathom Fishes

Train to Wigan

Magnus shifting rocks

The finished scarf

Nikita's first woven scarf

Knitting and sewing morning

Cruising at last

We left our winter mooring at St. Mary’s Marina, Rufford on 1^st June. The Canal & River Trust advice is only continuous live aboard cruisers can travel, otherwise you can only do a day trip and not stay on your boat over night.

Bye-bye St. Mary's

It is wonderful not to be cooped up in between two other boats and to have the bird feeder up.

We have celebrated three family birthdays at the end of May & into June, via Zoom of course. We had two birthday cake bake-offs with 7 cakes all over the country. Samantha’s cake theme was hedgehogs.

John’s cake theme was trains.

We are continuing to boat boarding school the grandchildren when mum & dad are at work. It is so much easier for them to have fun, now they can just run up & down the towpath. 

We made some tiny rafts with sticks and tied them together with plaited grass.

We are finding new routes for our ‘walk to school’ and met this lovely carving yesterday.

I washed all my baskets before we left the mooring (with endless supply of water) ready to display our wares when we actually open ‘Jubilee Fibres’.

We have had a couple of lovely evenings with this amazing sunset that looked like the hedge was on fire!!!

The highlight this week was seeing a barn owl in the late afternoon. The first day we hadn’t got the camera handy. So the next few days John was armed with his zoom lens, and we weren’t disappointed.

Soil erosion

I recall learning about soil erosion in O level geography and these last few days we’ve experienced it first hand. The fields of the Lancashire moss will no doubt be empty soon after all this wind. Yesterday we walked to Burscough to do some shopping and it was probably like a trek across the Sahara Desert. It was like walking  through clouds of smoke.

 

After we bushed off most of the dust we attended a family picnic that Heather had organised. It was super, seeing everyone and at very respectable distances. The furthest apart were 480 miles. The closest we were was 4 miles away from Heather, 9 miles from Ada, 223miles from Edmund and 270 miles from Samantha.

Inside the boat has a considerable black coating. We’ve cleaned the kitchen surface & dinette table but are leaving the rest of the boat until the wind dies down after the weekend.

Last Saturday evening we had a huge fight at the marina that took hours to resolve. The family of swans who were nesting above Rufford Lock had decided to pop into the marina. Mute swans are hugely territorial and the male from here was obviously not having any of it. It was distressing to see the two of them with their necks twisted together & the dominant one had the other ones head under the water. Our neighbour went out in her kayak & managed to separate them both. The swan that surrendered swam off & was hiding under one of the jetties. I thought if the other lad decided to go after him he’d no doubt end up being killed. So armed with a couple of bath towels we set off to relocate him back out onto the canal. He let me pick him up and we put the towel over his head. He was SO heavy one of the other chaps took him off of me. In the morning we were all shocked to see just 5 cygnets in the nest, s0 John went for a stroll out onto the canal and found the huge family of 9 cygnets & both parents. So it appears they have been evicted from their home!!

Thursday we decided to take the grandchildren home on the boat. Canal and River Trust have said we can cruise short distances. To our delight we met our gorgeous swan family as we cruised.

There was a wonderful welcoming committee awaiting us at Tarleton, loads & loads of geese and their goslings. We were busily trying to get the school work done before Heather came to pick them up, but the geese were such a distraction!!

On one of our walks to school the kids decided they wanted to catch tadpoles with theirs hands. Needless to say, we were very late getting back to start lessons!!! Such fun.

 

 

And another day we were late for school because we stood ages looking at the lambs.

As some of the lock-down measures have been lifted we went to the park, on our way to school last Wednesday. We were up bright & early & the kids knew the moment anyone else arrived we’d have to leave. No one came so guess what? Late starting school yet again!!!

 

Most evenings before bed the kids like to have a game of tag, which helps nan & grandad keep fit too.