Harnser's Travels: Dutton Mile Sunday 1 April 2018

Sunday 1 April 2018

Dutton Mile Sunday 1 April 2018

We over did it slightly last night with the food order, The Red Lion does 5 Tapas dishes for £15 so we had 10 different dishes between us and it was a bit much, Diana nipped down to the boat for a couple of containers to take the left overs back to the boat. Good job we were moored on their jetty. The down side of being moored there was the noise, It was still very noisy from the pub at half midnight when I went to bed and we woke several times in the early hours to loud heavy beat music, probably in parked cars. They must be hardy souls as the temperature dropped to freezing over night, before picking up again this morning.

We set off at half ten this morning, again it was quite bright but clouds gathered by lunch time and the forecast said rain, but we have only seen 6 spots.

I took another shot of the animal shelter we passed yesterday to show just how far it is away from the water.

We were soon down to Vale Royal locks but not before passing under Newbridge swing bridge, good job I didn't put the anemometer back on as the river had come back up over night.
You can see how little wind there was as we approached the lock,as we locked down the keeper said we may be held up for the Northwich regatta as they race from Vale Royal down to Hunts lock, but when he checked that said we were fine to go and we would meet the boats coming up, which we did. Most of them were well ordered and stayed to the right of the river, some got told to move over to the right side by a lady with a megaphone and a couple needed a blast on the horn. We just reached Hunts weir stream as the last two boats came out so we held back so they could cross our bow, by which time Bob and his assistant had the lock ready for us.

We stopped at Anderton Lift and had lunch before visiting the visitors Centre, it wasn't a planed visit but we could see cars parked down below. It turned out they were all Jaguars or Daimlers but there was only one old one among them. We thought about a coffee until we saw the length of the queue at the Cafe. The CRT trip boat was doing a roaring trade taking people up or down the lift at £8.25 a head, that should help the coffers. There were a couple of boats trading on the canal at the top, the Pirate boat and one selling tiller pins and rag rugs.

We carried on down stream passing the ex tar boat Tay, last time we saw her she was waiting to go down the Anderton Lift and visit the dry dock in Northwich.

I could hear motorbike as we continued on and looking back spotted these two doing a bit of hill climbing, on the first run they both made it successfully to the top but on the second run one of them didn't have quite enough momentum and grip to make it, ending in a couple of tumbles and returning to the bottom to try again.

I just had to include this shot of a cruiser moored at Barnton Cut, it just struck me so much of a smilie face with the bicycle wheels making the eyes.