Six boats have crashed into me in the past 3 hours, scraping and bouncing all the way down the length of the boat. The wind is too strong for occasional- and hire-boaters but it doesn't stop them, so they get blown into me as they clear the trees.

I want to move but the strong wind also means I cannot move the boat. There are 2 boats immediately ahead of me and I could never clear them.

Blissworth tunnel is long, but at least I can see the pinpoint of light at the end of the tunnel right from the start—as soon as my eyes adapt to the dark. (Amazing engineering, when you think about how straight that tunnel is.)

Tomorrow it's a visit to Canal & River Trust's canal museum, then right back through the tunnel.

I have a work call in the afternoon and the mobile signal is better on the north side of the tunnel.

Last summer we got trapped on the Lancaster Canal when it breached. Last month that was fixed.

Two boats with us there boated from Lancaster onto the Leeds & Liverpool Canal, up to Manchester on the part of Bridgewater Canal that didn't breach. They couldn't go south on the Macclesfield Canal because it breached this spring. So they got ship-certified to go down the Manchester Ship Canal to Ellesmere, to the Shropshire Union Canal.

The towpath here gets little use, so the ground is very soft, not compacted. To tie up the boat, I was able to sink mooring pins into the ground with a few taps and then just by stepping on them.

When passing boats go by, the water displacement pulls at moored boats. This may pull the pins loose, out of the ground, and set the boat adrift in the canal.

If that happens, I hope I'm awake, and that it's not raining.

I feed ducks store-bought bird seed and grains. They'll wait by the boat for hours, making the soft, cooing sound of ducks asking to be fed.

In North America the rule is Don't Feed The Wildlife. In England feeding is OK since nothing's natural. What the English call nature is a built and managed environment.

Canals were built. They're constantly maintained to prevent them from reverting to dry land.

Bradley Workshop is where Canal & River Trust uses oak, steel, and plastic to make its "smaller" lock gates weighing up to 1½ tonnes (1⅔ tons). Lock gates hold back the water, so that canals can step up a hill using water-filled chambers.

Within each lock gate is a plastic paddle (photo)—a vertical, underwater door that boaters wind up to partly drain or fill a lock chamber with a boat in it.

https://canalrivertrust.org.uk/specialist-teams/engineering/building-lock-gates

Diesel engines are noisy.

If boaters could sign even 20 words, we could communicate with each other.

Perhaps such warnings as:
• Person In Water.
• Unpowered Craft.
• Underwater Obstacle.
• Boat Behind Me (out of view).
• X Feet Clearance (at a bank or lock).

Or such messages as:
• I'm Mooring Here/Now.
• Your Boat Will Fit Here.
• I Want To Pass You.

What phrases would you want every boater to know?

Some canals have single locks, in pairs. This design offers a chance to chat with other boaters, since 2 boats can go up, or down, at the same time.

Chatting with another boat, I see and hear: she recovered from a stroke, hobbles, struggles to wind up the paddles; he recently fell and injured something unspecified.

Later, they moor their neatly kept boat nearby. As I help them tie up, I can see … this season may be their last.

This bast*rd bird bit me.

This swan was too dumb to figure out to chase sinking seed, so I leaned out the swan doors with a palmful of delicious birdseed in my flat, outstretched hand. Usually swans will feed this way before they learn to chase the sinking seed. This one decided to bite me.

It didn't break the skin, but nearly abraded the skin off my index finger.

I guess that makes me the stupid one.

UK inland canals are generally shallowest at the bank, deepest in the middle.

The deepest part may not be as deep as you'd expect. Typically, people can stand up in a canal. When boats sink, they end up sitting on the bottom.

The sunk boat in this photo has a keel—like a backbone rather than a flat bottom like a narrowboat—so once it touches the bottom of the canal, the boat rolls and settles at an angle.

In a crack in the oak beam of a lock gate, bees built a hive.

[Note that when lock gates open and close, they often thump against the stone lock chamber.]

Thump! Out come the bees!

And there I was, standing on the stern, surrounded by bees, trying to convince myself it's OK, it's just bees looking around.

Closed the gate gently, emptied the lock, opened the gate at the lower end, and got the boat clear!

Hugo was rescued by the RSPCA when he was a kitten. Now 15 years later, he lives a wonderful life on a canal boat - complete with cat flap! – with his human friend Andy. And Hugo is about to become a TV celebrity, featuring on Channel 4’s Narrow Escapes - a programme about life living on a narrowboat.

#GoodNews #catstodon #CanalLife

https://www.cheshire-live.co.uk/news/chester-cheshire-news/incredible-life-narrowboat-cat-after-31657486

With the boat moored along the bank, sanding one side of the hull above the rub rail took 40 minutes. Reapplying the black paint took about the same amount of time. All this while shuffling along the length of the boat sitting on a stool.

As soon as the boat is somewhere where the towpath is on the other side, weather permitting, the other side will get the same treatment.

In the past week, 3 times the boat crossed an elevated aqueduct that passed OVER other canals. Twice there were 4-way level junctions.

There was money to burn in the late 1700s and early 1800s…!

It's amazing that—however briefly—it was profitable to build all this infrastructure in order to move goods by barge and power the industrial revolution.

Another way technology makes boating easier: when people come to visit, all they need is a pin on a map.

Their phone's map app and in-car wayfinding narrator do the rest.

While boating, it pays to keep an eye peeled for things other boats have lost.

Yesterday's haul included two fenders (see photo).

They don't match, and they were spotted floating about an hour apart, on the canal.

Unseen by me, two geese slipped into the lock ahead of my big, 17-tonne boat.

Halfway through filling the lock, there's a honk from below. The geese had swum between the steel boat and the brick wall of the lock chamber. The boat is 6½ feet wide (1.95m), the lock 7 feet (2.15m). Not a lot to spare.

I had to hold the boat away from the wall while herding the geese back to the open space ahead of the bow.

On this gorgeous, sunny day, there are over 20 locks, back-to-back, with no place to stop and tie up along the way.

Yesterday was equally sunny. I wore long sleeves and a hat, but by early afternoon my hands were more red than brown. Today, I'll wear gloves to stop my hands from burning.

As the boat approaches the city, it's goodbye to green pastures—for a while—and hello bustling urbania.

Bankenland: Farben wie ein Sonnenuntergang am Wasser – chillen am Waterlooplein mit Stil.

#bankenland #amsterdam #waterlooplein #regenbogenbank #cityvibes #urbanbench #canallife #sunsetmood #farbenfroh #entdeckungstour https://www.instagram.com/p/DJFISjWsloB/