Rain........

......what a lot of rain!

Yesterday morning while I took Jack for a walk along the tow path Rod had a look at his gearbox problem, it turned out to be something requiring expert attention, he phoned an engineer he knew and luckily he was able to get along and sort out the problem, but by then it was early afternoon so we decided to move today, the forecast looked ok.

The forecast changed by this morning, it wasn't looking great, rain and possibly lots of it, but if we wanted to catch the fuel boat we needed to at least make some progress, so we donned wet weather gear and set off just after 9am, at first it wasn't too bad and we had about five lock free miles to before we needed to decide whether to continue working locks in the rain or not. But the rain chased us along, we were both ok apart from cold wet hands, gloves may say water resistant but they really aren't. We had to pass the very long line of permanent moorings again, it really feels a lot longer when it's raining as well, they took ages to pass but the rain really started to come down hard once we had cleared them, and so it went on, the five miles or so took about two and a half hours because half of it was passing boats on tick over. We stopped on the visitor moorings at The Shady Oak pub, I'd had an idea we would stop here for lunch on our return from Chester but it wasn't happening today!

After a cuppa and a chat we decided the weather had improved enough for us to continue and get to the meeting place with the fuel boat today, the forecast for tomorrow was pretty dire as well so better to get cold and wet once and rest up tomorrow.

After going through 4 locks (10-13) and Bunbury staircase lock without further rain I was very pleased to see space on the same visitor mooring we had used on the journey down just before Calveley services, the fuel boat should be passing here tomorrow afternoon before winding (turning) just past our position and heading back down the Shropshire canal.

It was just about 4pm so a long day, but with a break halfway it didn't seem too bad, but I don't want to repeat cruising in the rain like this morning again in a hurry!

No pictures, the camera and Jack stayed below deck in the dry today.

Totals today: 9.5miles : 6 locks (1 a staircase of 2)