Departure for Liverpool

We booked Liverpool a little while ago, then discovered it was Bank Holiday.  Could be good as I am sure that there will be a lot going on and we have invited “The Cooks” to join us.  But we have got to get there starting tomorrow.   It will be 6 hours a day and the boat needs to be prepped with groceries for the next few days as well as making beds, tidying laundry away, topping the diesel and getting a pump-out.  So we arrived this morning and did all those things by 11:30, so decided to get a few hours under our belt, but not too many because we did get up at 04:00 this morning.

There was certainly a lot of boats moving, though mostly opposite direction because there was no hold up at Hillmorton and enough traffic coming the other way to give us an easy ride down the 3 locks, all of which were working by the way.   Otherwise little to report.  Offside vegetation is becoming a problem again in places.  Lots of scraping down the side of our recently pained boat squeezing between the offside, a line of moored boats and an opposite direction craft appearing round the corner at the popular mooring spot on the piling before Easenhall Lane Bridge.  We did have a near miss potentially a broadside hitting a boat emerging unexpectedly from Brinklow Marina.  Fortunately we were going slowly and disaster was averted.   We used to moor at Brinklow and it is a difficult turn out, the only visibility being a lookout posted on the bow or a long blast on the horn.