A day of locks, 20 in all. We travelled along this bit of canal in 2018 when we had a weeks boating holiday. On that occasion we sailed from Audlem to the Anchor at High Offley doing 15 miles and 26 locks in all, we must have been mad although I suspect the prospect of a pint or two in the Anchor kept us going. On that occasion Gill did all the work opening and closing gates leaving me to embarrass myself smashing into the sides of the locks. Gill is now more confident of driving so we split the work this time.
I don’t think the Anchor will be open at the moment, the bar is so small it would be impossible to get 1m from anyone else and Olive, the lovely landlady, must be in her 80’s so highly vulnerable so we opted for a night in Market Drayton.
Today the locks were not too bad, in an ideal world as you are ready to leave each lock you see another boat just about to depart the one in front coming towards you as in the picture attached. That way you both leave the gates open, you don’t have to fill or empty the lock before you go in nor moor up whilst you do so. To maximise the chance of this we waited until mid morning before setting off, this gave other boaters a chance to be filling up the locks ahead of us and it worked well. We met boats coming the other way in about half the locks.
Tomorrow we have another flight of five locks followed by a long level stretch to either Norbury Junction or Gnosall for Thursday night. Then I am afraid we have our last day doing the rest of the journey to Wolverhampton where we hand the boat back on Saturday morning.