To plan this expedition I used an amazing web site called Canal Plan AC which allows you to type in the start and end points of your journey, any points you want to visit on route and how long you want to travel each day. It then creates a detailed itinerary showing every bridge, lock and aqueduct. Ours runs to 96 pages! It gives all the distances in miles and furlongs (if you don’t know what a furlong is ask your grandad).

Being sensitive to the needs of the planet and a mean old bugger I did not print out the 96 pages, they are on my laptop if I need to look something up. For the day to day navigation I have been using the OS maps which are 40 years out of date but the canal has not moved so no problem (the M54 is a dotted line, proposed route!). Big problem today, the OS map indicates a right turn onto a different canal, after two locks I was puzzled and then looked at the map a little closer. As you can see in the picture, we should have turned left, and then crossed the other canal via an aqueduct. The snag is narrow boats go in narrow canals so turning round is a problem and they don’t steer backwards.
In the end we found a bit of a lock pound which seemed big enough, Gill pulled on a rope attached to the front and I steered the back round, we nearly got completely stuck across the canal but with six inches to spare we made it - phew!!! So we are now going in the right direction on the Macclesfield canal and are moored in Congleton.