Saturday 24 July 2010

Brighouse and Sowerby Bridge




More homeward bound cruising today as we head up towards Sowerby Bridge through Brighouse. The humans awake to discover that they have filled one of the toilet tanks up and rather than be reduced to the single aft "heads" for the rest of the holiday, they will try to get a "pump-out" at Brighouse's Sagar Marine engineering works.
On the way back up through Brighouse we are hailed by an old beardy guy with a narrow boat called Peppa which has expired and needs a hand up through the lock to the Brighouse basin. We take this guy in tow and then hand-over-hand him into the lock next to us, before lashing stem to stem, stern to stern so that we can manouvre him in the basin. By this method we get him moored alongside in the basin where he is happily Googling an engineer he knows in the locality. He has a 70 year old engine on board and the ancient chain-drive transmission has failed. Sagar Marine can't help him - he needs a "vintage boats" expert. They can, though, and do, pump us out. We are good to go.
We pair up with another "Shire Cruisers" boat (Hereford) and share locks all the way up through Brookfoot, Elland and Salterhebble bottom lock. Here we must part because (after completing an inadvertant but very neat pirrhouette when our bows catches the outflow from the emptying lock) the top two locks at Salter will only take one 56 footer at once. They are finishing their holiday anyway and giving the boat back tonight. We have one more night of sleeping on the boat, a night of Murder, Mystery and Suspense.... nearly. But more on that tomorrow
Deefski

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