Holmes Swing Bridge Saturday 28 April 2018

Yesterday evening lots of coincidences happened, 2 Narrowboating friends who live in Southport rang to arrange meeting The Saracens Head for a drink, the people off the boat moored in front knocked on the boat, they also live in Southport and moor in the same marina as us one jetty over and then the chap off the boat behind came out who we met a few years back on the T&M canal.

Halsall is where the first sod was cut on the Leeds and Liverpool canal back in 1770 and there is a stone statue of a Navi digging a hole by bridge 25.

About a mile down the cut halfway between bridges 24 and 23 CRT have erected a plaque to commemorate it, it doesn't really do it justice and looks more like a sign to tell you someone has the fishing rights.

Bridge 24 is a bit unusual as the stones are all numbered and lettered to show their position, letters for rows and numbers left to right while looking at the towpath side. This is in addition to all the mason marks so I wonder if the bridge has been rebuilt.

We saw two classic bits of driving today, the first was as I waited at Coxhead swing bridge. A lady reversed her horsebox out of the farm gate onto the road in front of an oncoming van, there was someone standing waiting to close the gate but it didn't occur to them to look down the road, she then played with her phone, probably taking photos of the horses as she drove towards the bridge before proceeded to take her jacket off all while driving a horsebox.

Just beyond the bridge the Scouts were having a clean up, about 5 canoes forcing theirway into the offside reeds to pick up floating plastic and rubbish while others were walking the tow path with bags and litter pickers. They even had a visit from the Mayor of Maghull to give them encouragement and wish them well.

I don't know if this is part of the Maghull in Bloom campaign as we notices several notices more in the town asking people to keep the towpath clean.

We stopped for a bit between bridges 14 and 14A to visit Morrisons which is just across the swing bridge, I did consider mooring on the bridge moorings, well we have only seen one boat all day but thought better of it and put a couple of pins in.

Our second bit of classic driving came at Maghull Hall Swing bridge where Diana was operating the electric bridge, She waited for a lull in the traffic before pressing the "Open bridge" button, this set the lights flashing and audible alarms sounding for a few seconds before dropping the barriers, the driver in question just cleared the second barrier as she sped across the bridge against the lights and the barriers starting to move. Just beyond the bridge the canal was bright green with dye, we then spotted 2 CRT chaps back on the bridge so I suspect they were trying to trace a leak in the bank there. I hope I didn't spoil it stirring it up a bit.

We saw quite a mixture of colours of Bluebells, can you call them Bluebells if they are not blue, these were blue, white and a sort of pink/mauve colour.

We decided to moor just before bridge 10, that gives us about half an hours run to bridge 9 in the morning, it was suggested to us by local boaters that this is better as its a more rural mooring, well there are about 20 horses in the fields opposite us. We had to move an obstruction at bridge 11, there was a solid floating bank of weeds rightacross the canal and its quite surprising how they slowed the boat down when I hit them to push them through the bridge and to one side.

Today's Journey 8 miles in 3¼ hours