Saturday 25th June 2016
Today’s task was to prepare the boat for the next 9 locks on the Huddersfield Canal as these locks are short at 57 foot long, yet nb Lucy is 60 foot long. So basically, we are going to try to fit a square peg into a round hole. We know that nb Lucy has been through these locks before so we are confident about taking her through but with a few modifications. We have removed the front fender and the rear fender which will give us about another two feet. The other foot that is missing we will gain by putting her in sideways. All the locks that are coming up are double width compared to the single width that we have been on so far. Picture below shows the back fender removed and sitting on the deck.
We will be descending in all, 9 short locks which means that once nb Lucy is in the lock we will let the water out extremely slowly to make sure that she does not catch on the rear cill. This is every boater’s nightmare as this is when you can sink your boat. We were told when we picked her up that if we sink her because of poor placement on a cill, the insurance will not cover for this – eeekkk!
Another little task for today was to fix the front brake up on one of the fold up bikes. We were able to source a part from the local Huddersfield bike shop and do the necessary repairs using Pete’s handy tool (thanks Pete, yet again)
BTW – We have been referring to this canal as the Huddersfield but it is actually split into what is called the Huddersfield Narrow and the Huddersfield Broad canal. You go from the Narrow to the Broad at Aspley Basin in Huddersfield. It’s a good spot with excellent moorings as you can see below.
The rest of today has been spent looking around Huddersfield. There are some fine stone buildings in the town, no doubt built when the town was an industrious textile and mill town. One such stone building was the George Hotel, which according to a plaque on the wall was the site of where some of the northern rugby football clubs broke away to form a new competition that would eventually become the new code called rugby league football. Australia of course adopted this code and it is the predominate code of football played in NSW and Queensland today.
George Hotel Huddersfield
Today Toque and Maples also had a little play date with some of the other dogs from other boats and they invited them on the back deck
Tomorrow we will head off out of Aspley Basin and towards the 57 foot short locks.
First task will be to get under the interesting lift bridge at the end of the basin, called the Locomotive Bridge, which lifts straight up rather than tilting from a hinge like so many of the others
Rowkin Rovings Blog 