Dover Bridge

What a change in the weather today.  Blue skies to start with, no wind to speak of, and as the day wore on it became shorts and topless (for me at least). We set off from our moorings early and started the climb up the 6 locks of the Rufford Arm.  Mostly straightforward and with some help from the lengthsman for two, as he was just passing on his morning inspection.  The locks have tail bridges but no access over the top gates and as each paddle has to be unlocked and relocked it seemed easier to operate the locks one sided with Pat walking on to prepare the next as is our usual practice.  However, the third lock from the top did not seem to want to fill that last inch, and indeed, looking at the bottom gates there seemed to be quite a leak below the waterline.  So quite a delay then while I had to walk round to work the opposite ground paddle, get the gate open and then walk back to lock everything up again.  Unbeknown to me, Pat was holding up a boat coming down, a trainee on a helmsman course, so they wern't unhappy and knew already of my problem from past experience.  Then one ground paddle on the top lock was U/S and this one took ages to fill.   Once on the Leeds and Liverpool main line, progress picked up but interruped by the swing bridges.  The first is fully automated, the second only partly needing lots of walking over and back to secure the gates and finally to retrieve the key.  The third was manual.   Regarding the locks there seemed to be all sorts of problems, mostly caused by paddles which didn't work so that the water was not going where we expected and the boat was moving around too much in the lock.  Being short locks the bows were always getting caught in the jet from the ground paddles when they worked or the risk of getting swamped from gate paddles.  With hindsight I might have roped the boat up properly as we do on the Grand Union.   One ground paddle at Wigan we found we couldn't unlock as the spindle inside the mechanism was so rounded off that our keys would not bite.  We pressed on after Wigan to Dover Bridge.  Plenty of mooring, good grass verges, chair out and a cool beer in the sunshine.

Comments

[bryansmith]

Actually where is dover bridge located in U.S

[rugby merchandise]

Enjoying the nature in dover bridge