Wheelock to Church Lawton - 20 locks, 4.5 miles, 5.5 hours

It was a bright crisp morning when we set off.

George has spent the last couple of days snuggled up as close to the fire as he could possibly get!!

The first job of the day was to reverse up the canal a couple of hundred metres to the water point!! Canal boats don't steer well in reverse but luckily we had the bow thrusters to assist with keeping the boat on track.

We knew we had a long day, given the number of locks we had to get through and it was doubtful we would pass much traffic on the way, yesterday two boats came passed and one of those was a canal and river trust tug, the bad news was that the last boat to go passed was heading in the same direction as we were going, which meant that the first few locks would definitely be against us - and so it was, in fact 14 of the 20 locks were against us meaning extra work :-(.

It was a lovely morning, cold, crisp and very sunny - perfect winter morning.

As we came through one of the locks, we met up with Ollie another Border Terrier, we had bumped into him on Wedenesday when George and I had gone for a long walk.

Ollie's owner kindly helped us through a couple of the locks, which was much appreciated.

Now please make sure you are sitting down before you look at the next picture!!

Yes Rodney is using a lock handle, a rare but beautiful sight!! The plan was he would wind down the slackers and open the gate, whilst I went on to get the next lock ready, he did get distracted on more than one occasion, as it would say on a school report - room for improvement :-)).

As we travelled on up the locks we could see a castle in the distance.

We did initially think this might be the hill that the Harecastle tunnel goes through but it is in fact, Mow Cop Castle, shows how much we know.

We finally passed a boat at lock number 14, which in theory meant the rest of the locks should be in our favour, not quite true of them all as some are leaking so badly they managed to fill up again before we got there, but we did at least have a few that could just be opened.

As travelled on we came through the first of 6 locks that would take us up to our mooring spot in Church Lawton.  We passed some nice bungalows with a variety of verandas over looking the canal, this one seemed a little extreme.

We finally arrived at the moorings, this was the view from the side hatch, as the sun started to go down.

(EH 433.3)