The Ashton Canal - No longer "bandit country", but still problems with navigating it.

(Boat Flamingo - posted by Cath)

Thomas Telford Basin - a secure and quiet refuge in Manchester.

The Ashton Canal is notorious. You will hear stories of gangs of feral children ("bandits") stoning boaters as they try to work up the locks. The reality is that the families of troublemakers were largely moved out years ago. The flight is now bordered by blocks of chic and expensive apartments. You are more likely to see joggers and families with pushchairs than 'bandits'. However, it is important to realise that we weren't far from where we had the unhelpful kids the previous day. In fact, because the canals are parallel at the beginning, barely a third of a mile, but, somehow it seems populated far more by what would have been called 'yuppies' a few decades back.

Setting off - the start of the canal is "urban chic" these days.

We set off up the flight in the sunshine. The first few locks were 'our way' and didn't need emptying so we made reasonable progress. Passers by chatted, asking about the boat, or how the lock works. A man and his elderly dad told us to watch out for the troublemakers we would encounter up the flight. There were large numbers of runners out, many of them walking back down the flight wearing medals and race numbers for a 10K race. We passed a stadium where an amplified woman's voice was commenting on the race, and cheering the runners on.

We passed the National Cycle Centre. The sun shone. We knew that we had to get nearly to the top of the flight by about 4 pm, as there is a broken swing bridge and CRT open it twice a day (8:00 - 9:00 am and 4:00 - 5:00 pm). There was no hurry, things were going well.

The building with somewhat crazy sides.

Then Flamingo stopped centre channel. A bit of poking around with the short shaft showed something around 2 feet of water (Flamingo draws nearly 3 feet), and a large number of solid rectangular blocks under the water - probably coping stones, though how anyone had managed to lob them mid channel I have no idea. The pound was down around a foot. I was on the tow-path, David on the front of the boat, trying to locate the deepest water - but also transfer weight forwards, we'd learned on the Rochdale what a surprising difference moving one person from the stern to the bows would make. I went up to the next lock, perhaps a hundred yards, and started flushing water down. As it was so far to the boat, and because the pound was significantly down I thought we would have little chance of moving the boat, but, slowly, steadily Flamingo started to move as the wave of water going down reached her. We'd taken quite a lot of water out of the next pound up but we'd made it to the lock.

Alan and David contemplate the "bottom too near the top" situation.

The problem with going up hill on a flight is that any water that you run down is taking it from a pound you are going to have to go through later on. Going downhill you take the water with you. So we were struggling for several locks, trying to let enough water down to get through the pound, without taking too much out of the next one.

We spotted some boats a few locks back following us, and catching up fairly fast as they weren't struggling to get into each lock. 

A recurring theme - often pulling does better than the engine can.

The next lock was empty with one gate was open, the other nearly so, so Alan was planning on nudging the gate open with the bows. I spotted that there was a mobility scooter parked on the wrong side of the balance beam of the lock, so that if Flamingo went into the lock the scooter would be swept onto Flamingo. So Alan had to stop fairly quickly to prevent that happening. The owner of the scooter - who was fishing - faffed around, he couldn't find the keys, he couldn't move the scooter so it took a while before it was possible to get the boat into the lock. Unfortunately, the sudden reversing had pulled up some of the rubbish from the bottom of the canal, and we had a serious prop foul. Added to which the boat had drifted sideways with her bows in the lock apron, so was jammed. 

David took a pole and started to push the stern out so that the boat could go straight into the lock, but Flamingo was stuck on the bottom - the following boats had started to drain the pound we were in. The fisherman with the mobility scooter was full of advice about what we should be doing, shouting advice loudly, but he didn't really seem to understand what our problems were. 

I went up a couple of locks to let some water down. When I got back I found David lying on the lockside trying to use a freezer saw to remove more of the fouling from the prop. I held onto his belt to stop him from sliding from the lockside under the back end of the boat. We don't really have a freezer on the boat, but we have two freezer saws, specifically for removing fabric from the prop. Each time David got a bit more of the curtain (and flags, and dresses) off the prop before we headed on to the next lock. The people on the following boats were helpful, and sympathetic, but like us they wanted to get to the broken swing bridge and get through it.

Not seen by us in a long while 
- Equus, one of the oldest surviving iron hulls.

Finally we got to lock 16, I left Alan and David to get the boat through, and went on to talk to the CRT employees, explaining that there were two or three boats following us who all needed to get through the swing bridge. It was the two men who had had to rescue us twice the previous day, and they seemed sympathetic to my pleas that they let all the boats through.

Flamingo went through the swing bridge at 4:00 pm. Then the last two locks and we could tie up to take on water and empty the toilet cassettes. After the last two days I went and got straight in the shower while we were taking on water. David stripped to the waist and got into the canal, where he started to try to clear the prop properly. After he cut his hand he called for some gardening gloves that we use to handle coal - there was barbed wire twisted around the prop. The bolt croppers we had bought weeks ago in Manchester made short work of that.

We didn't see the other boats, which was somewhat surprising as they had been very close behind us. It turned out that the CRT employees had let us through, then gone away. The other boats had to call CRT out again and only got to the top of the flight around an hour and a half after us.

Then there was a trip of a few miles to Dukinfield junction where we planned to moor for the night. I had planned to go to the nearby Asda superstore, until Alan reminded me that it was Sunday and Asda had shut hours earlier.

The final few miles to the Peak Forest Canal were slow, and mooring close to the bank at Dukinfield was impossible. We managed to get the boat close enough in that the dogs could jump the gap to the towpath- fortunately they are both fit. I cobbled together some kind of meal from what I could find in the fridge and the cupboard - while motorcycles roared up and down the towpath outside.

Here to There
Miles 1.0, Locks: 0
Total Miles 2.0, Total Locks: 0