We put in another long day of traveling today. We have already visited most of the towns on the Llangollen canal on the way up, so we don’t need to do the tourist stuff on the way down. We had a couple of unscheduled stops, though. We had just come down the Grindley Brook flight of locks and I was coming out of a bridge. There was rental boat was coming the other way, right in the middle of the canal. Apparently this was their first day on the boat, and the lacked some basic boating skills, like steering.

You are supposed to pass port to port, so I was forced to go way over on the non-towpath side to get round them. It’s often very shallow there, and I did indeed run aground, though only on mud. I shouted at them to stop so that I could get off, and went into hard reverse, to get off the mud bank. I drifted backwards, but there was a loud cough from the engine, a cloud of diesel exhaust, and the prop started turning much faster.

I was worried that something had broken, but I was near enough to the bank to get off and pull the boat out of the way, so the idiots who were hogging the canal could get by. I shut off the engine, opened the weed hatch and inspected the propeller. It was still there, and with the right number of blades. Forward and reverse worked OK, too, after I locked down the weed hatch. I suspect a stick from the mud bank had jammed the prop for a second or two, but broke and allowed us to resume normal operations. On again, on again.

We were coming down through another lock. Paula was driving and I was working the lock gates for a change. It had been threatening rain all day, and it finally started. I put on a waterproof jacket, but my jeans were getting wet as we made it down through that lock and grabbed the first available mooring. The lock was right by a pub with outdoor seating, and the one customer who was sitting outside just put up his umbrella and went on drinking his beer. He even helped me with the lock gates, while muttering gloomily about the rain having set in for the day.

Once we were moored I got out of my wet things and into a hot shower. The diesel engine is also the water heater, so it’s best to shower right after the engine has been running. By the time I got out of the shower the rain had stopped. I put on shorts because my only other pair of jeans was in the dirty laundry, and a T-shirt because working lock gates is sweaty work. By the time we got the boat moving again, the clouds had mostly blown away, and the sun was shining.

Yes, we actually had about an hour and a half of shorts and T-shirt weather. I was singing Here Comes The Sun as we motored down to Wrenbury, a little village with a church, two pubs, a marina, and (oh joy) an electric lift bridge. The other lift bridges on this canal are all manual hydraulic ones that require a lot of hard work with a windlass.

We moored up, and set out to look at the village. The sun went in and it started raining. I think we just had the British summer. It was 90 minutes long. We may not see the sun again till we get back to San Francisco in September.