Friday 26th July 2013

Having recovered from the Rochdale 9 we now had the Ashton 18 to contend with. We left at 8.15 and saw lots of commuters walking to work along the tow path. I was struck how they don't listen to the sounds of the city anymore. They all had earphones in and were either talking on their phones or listening to music. I thought it rather sad as many didn't respond to a "Good Morning" presumably they couldn't hear us.

The architecture continued to be very interesting. The Chips building being a prime example.

There is a great deal of new building going on but the recession has hit the regeneration of Manchester which had hoped to build on the success of the 2002 Commonwealth Games. Too often we still find buildings like this.

The Man City Etithad Stadium was difficult to capture. Here is the best view I could get.

You could see it for miles along the canal as we got further and further from Manchester.

Progress was slow as all the locks had anti-vandal mechanisms attached to them which necessitates time being spent unlocking with a key. We were lucky that some of the locks were empty for us although we are not sure how, as we passed only 2 boats going in the opposite direction all day. 

The dreaded masses of children didn't materialise, only a few harmless youngsters at the last 3 locks who spent all their time hinting about seeing inside a boat! We did have some interesting experiences.

1) The level was so low in one lock that we were hitting the bottom

2) The amount of rubbish was terrible. We met one family whose propeller was completely wrapped in thick plastic sheeting and he was having to slice through it with a Stanley Knife.

3) We did pass through the deepest narrow lock on the whole system.

The whole journey took much longer than we had anticipated as we had to fill some of the pounds as the level was so low. Still we are now moored for the night. A 24 hour Asda is quite close and we look forward to seeing the family tomorrow.