4 Counties Ring - Day 5 - Caldon Canal - Endon to Black Lion pub at Consall Forge

Engine:5.8h Miles:9.5 Locks:9

Bright sunny start. Up and breakfasted in good time.

Watered up at Park Lane Services. Esso garage visible from Bridge 31. Possible grocery source?

Met a boat coming up Hazlehurst Locks so all set for us!

Arrived Froghall 13:30 for lunch.

Churnett Valley very beautiful but canal very narrow and twisty for much of the way - the helm is never bored!

Part of the way we join the river itself - lots of space beside and below the boat - quite a different feeling.

Crew (Andrew) employed on voyage with scraping and painting the bows.

Beautiful sunny day and a top mooring opposite the pub. Definite advantage of having a shorter boat which can squeeze into small lengths!

The final tunnel - too low for us...

Nice meal and beer at the pub. Free range chickens wandering around the pub garden and occasionally indoors. Wide range of beers and ciders.

Another top mooring!

4 Counties Ring - Day 4 - Trent & Mersey Westport Lake to Caldon Canal Endon

Engine:6.8h Miles:10.5 Locks:9

A gentle start after the exertions of the previous couple of days. Alison stiff and Andrew nursing a sore shoulder after trying to stop a lock gate swinging open...

Raspberries foraged while waiting in yesterday's queue with muesli for breakfast - delicious!

Stopped at Etruria Wharf at 11:15 for water, Elsan and waste.

Staircase locks not straighfoward but negotiated eventually. (What Alison means here is that I managed to ground a boat coming down the locks by forgetting to close the paddles on the bottom lock... Owner was very understanding...- Andrew).

Bridge 9 - they were certainly were not kidding about the low headroom. Had to remove the chimney and Alison had to dismount from her steering stool!

Did some shopping at Milton which was mostly closed apart from the bookshop and a Coop and Nisa in competition.

Teamed up with 30ft Civente to go through the locks together. They are based on the Lancaster Canal and get onto the main system with a tow over the Ribble Link from the pilots @ £60 a go (interesting idea!)

4 Counties Ring - Day 3 - Trent & Mersey Rode Heath to Westport Lake

Engine:5.8h Miles:6 Locks 12 & Harecastle Tunnel

Steady progress through the remaining Cheshire Locks.

Passed Linda King (teapot) with Liz (Laus Deo choir!) as crew. It's a small world...

Queuing from Red Bull services and major queue at the Harecastle Tunnel. A Health and Safety survey in the morning meant late opening plus canal much busier now the rain has calmed down.

Entered the tunnel at 15:56 and exited at 16:40 after a trouble free transit. We were last in our convoy of 8 boats and the tunnel was therefore lit up for us by the lights of the other boats. Quite relaxing really. Even managed to spot the skeleton this time!

A sunny evening at last and a pretty mooring overlooking Westport Lake which we walked around after dinner to stretch our legs - very pleasant.

4 Counties Ring - Day 2 - Middlewich Branch (Bridges 24/25) to Rode Heath

Engine:7.4h Miles:11 Locks:21

Shared 2 locks with 30' Aslan II.

Paused for shopping 10:15 at the Mace stores near Kings Lock Middlewich.

Heavy rain at start of morning clearing with SW breeze.

Lunch stop just past bridge 158 on outskirts of Sandbach.

Pushed on during afternoon to find top mooring outside the Broughton Arms at Rode Heath. Not our first visit to this pub and we had another nice meal with good beer!

Heavy rain and hailstorm in the evening forced us to stay in the pub and have another pint while waiting for it to ease. This on top of belly pork and black pudding + banana cheesecake sundae for Andrew and steak and ale pie + chocolate crownie for Alison...

Still.. We had earned it with 21 locks today!

4 Counties Ring - Day 1 - Swanley Bridge Marina to Middlewich Branch (Bridges 24/25)

Engine:5.3h Miles:12 Locks:6

Start of our longest trip to date.

Set off around 12:30. Through Barbridge Junction and mooring by about 14:30.

Needed long throw windlass for Church Minshull lock.

Sorting out the gremlins...

My previous work had left us with a new new control unit but also a couple of troublesome issues which took a while to sort out and, for a while, baffled a variety of canal engineers...

The first problem was that the engine would mysteriously cut out for no apparent reason when put into gear. It would start OK but then when the throttle lever was returned to upright position would quietly die... 

This made it pretty difficult to carry out most manoeuvres such as setting off from a mooring or winding. Pretty much anything really... Once restarted it would run fine.

At one point I even had to abandon the boat by the side of the canal at Wrenbury Mill and yomp back to the marina in order to go down to Worcestershire for (irony of ironies) a boat maintenance course! I picked the instructor's brain about possible causes, all of which sounded potentially expensive.

Alison and I returned to the boat the following weekend ready, if necessary to bow-haul the boat 4 miles back to the marina. We had the engineer from Wrenbury Marine on the boat for about two hours trying to locate the problem. He could replicate but not identify the issue.

This was eventually solved by a guy walking his whippet along the tow-path. He asked whether we had checked the stop cable... Turned out that the throttle cable was just touching the stop cable and would pull it enough to stop the engine whenever it was put into gear! The engineer, who had returned (100 yards) to base to consult with colleagues, was amazed when I wandered along to tell him that I had fixed it!

The second problem was an annoying problem with the alternator which would randomly decide not to charge the batteries. Would be fine when starting off from the marina but after spending a night moored somewhere else would fail to generate.

After removing the alternator, getting it refurbished, checked and tested didn't solve the problem, I eventually tracked this down (thanks Google!) to lack of excitation!

Apparently alternators need some current up front so they can remember what electricity is... This is normally provided through the warning lamp on the control panel.

Now... I had replaced the old style warning lamp with a nice purpose built job with nice neat symbols on it. Turns out that this does not draw enough power to excite the alternator... It was presumably OK when starting from the marina because the batteries were fully charged from the shoreline.

However after mooring overnight, the batteries were still plenty charged to turn and start the engine but not enough to excite the alternator.

I fixed this while moored in Middlewich at the Folk and Boat Festival by putting an old style bulb in parallel inside the control box. Now works fine. Go figure!

Since then things have been fairly trouble-free. (Did I really say that.... Touch wood!)

Constructing the new control panel

As described in the previous post, I was planning a new control unit to move the ignition and gauges from behind the throttle lever. I had done a lot of preparatory work but the final construction would have to take place on the boat.

The key (and rather scary) points are that 1) I would be making this up as I went along to some extent as it would be a totally custom made unit and 2) at some point, I would probably have to break the boat when I removed the old control unit before final connection of the new unit. One possible plan was to make the new unit plug into a large connector near the engine allowing me to retreat if it all went pear-shaped. However this turned out not to be viable... Scary! This gives an idea of the state of the wiring in the engine hole before I started.

That corrugated trunking looping round and round in the engine hole is, according to the manual is not meant to be longer than 1 metre ...

Anyway, I had prepared as much as possible at home. The various gauges, switches and lamps were fitted to the box lid and the shoreline connector to one side of the base. An LED strip on the other side of the base would be a cunning light that would help with late night returns to the boat.

This shot shows a trial run to position the new unit and work out how to run the wires into the engine hole (which involved drilling and filing smooth a new hole in the deck!).

The next couple of shots show the painted box being firmly fixed with self-tapping screws to the back wall of the cabin and the shoreline wiring being routed in.

Unfortunately, I didn't take any more pictures during the actual wiring of the engine controls as I was a bit busy... But I was quite pleased with the outcome!

The old control unit looked a bit sad though...

So I had to make a trip to B&Q in Crewe to buy some aluminium bits that I would be able to work using the tools I had on board. Then took the boat on a little trip towards Wrenbury and made a new cover for the throttle unit while moored up by the side of the canal. Et voila!

A pretty successful end to a fairly long and, at times, scary process!

There were a couple of minor complications which surfaced later which I will cover in the next post...