Leaving Swanley

I suppose you could class today as the begining of our annual cruising.  At approximatly 3pm we eventually managed to get Tonni back on board and we untied. Tonni was not amused to firstly have her clothes put on, and then to find her boat was moving. 

After the last week of lovely warm weather, today is overcast and had a cold wind - I hope thats not some form of omen for our cruise.

Hurlestone Locks were busy, we followed 2 down, but had a few boats coming up.  Was also assisted by Smurf & Mrs Smurf.  It was Mrs Smurf's first really time doing locks, I think she got the hang of it quite quickly - memo to self - get the Smurfs to help us with Heart Break in the future!

We ended up following a pair of working boats travelling together.  We thought they might have been going to go to Ellesmere Port for the working boat festival at Easter....but no such luck - they headed slowly along the Middlewich Branch.

We've cruised the Middlewich Branch many times and have invariably commented to each other at the number of boats between the Jolly Tar and Bridge 2 that had out of date licences.  So we were surprised today to only see 2 boats that had expired licences on show - and even those were not grossly out of date.

4 locks; 4 miles