A much better day today, with plenty of sunshine and much less of a wind. First thing, Phil, one of the carpenters, came over to fit shelves in the cupboard in the engine room. He’d made them yesterday and had been waiting for the varnish to dry. It’s a cupboard for odds and ends, such as the vacuum cleaner, paper towels, and such like.
The black box on the left hand side is the clutch mechanism, which means that we can disengage the engine to run it to charge the batteries.
So we didn’t leave too early, we went for a walk — doing the southern part of the route I did yesterday, down from Higher Poynton to Pott Shrigley, up by the Christmas tree farm, and back along the towpath. By then I’d had an email from our winter base confirming which mooring we should go onto, so we set off on electric propulsion, straight into the bright sunshine.
Before long we were passing the bridge where we’d come out onto the towpath on our walk. Lots of the canal is rather pretty, even with the pylons.
When we got to Lyme View Marina we turned into the first entrance, and made our way to the far end, where our berth was. It’s all very tight but we got reversed in ok, tied up, and went to see the office to get checked in. The staff here are very friendly and very responsive; for example our pontoon (and they’re all concrete, so not the most boat-friendly) was missing a tyre fender, and within an hour or two a chap came along to replace it. We’ve got a code for all the facilities, and we’re plugged in to the electric. The nearest tap is quite a distance away, so next time we come in we’re moor bow-in, so the hose pipe will reach.
We’ll be here for the winter, although if there are periods of nice weather we might venture out. After lunch we walked up Middlewood Way back to Braidbar to collect the car, then popped down to Poynton on our way back to the marina. I’ve made a big pot of chilli, at least half of which will be going in the freezer.
1 mile, 0 locks.