I was woken around 4am this morning by the boat crunching against the side of the canal. After two days of heavy rain the canal had reached the level of the towpath, and the fenders had nothing to press against. Round the corner in Piccadilly Basin the towpath was entirely submerged.

About half a month’s worth of rain fell in the past 24 hours. Manchester canal flooding was mentioned on the BBC news. I was responsible for some of it. There was so much water in the pound we were in that it was pouring over the lock gates. You can’t go down through a lock in those circumstances, if you can’t get it empty enough to open the bottom gates. The solution is to open the top and bottom paddles at the same time so the water runs through the lock until the level in the top pound drops and you can get through the lock. For the big pound we were in this took about an hour.

There is a problem with this approach, though. As you empty the pound above the lock, you flood the one below it. We had nine locks to go through today, big heavy double wide locks, so we sent flooding ahead of us through central Manchester. In some places there was no towpath and in some places we flooded the towpath. It took us about four hours to get down (five if you include the time to drain the top pound. But we made it.

Greg and Karen were rock stars. Karen managed the bow line, keeping the boat positioned correctly in the double wide locks, and Greg and I worked the lock gates, one of us on each side. Paula drove and managed the stern line. Greg decided that after four hours of lock grunting he had not had enough exercise, so he set out to run ten miles along the Bridgewater canal to our mooring spot for the night, which turned into twelve or so when he overshot.

After the tribulations of the Rochdale canal in Manchester, the Bridgwater was a dawdle: deep, wide, and very few moored boats. There’s lots of graffiti, but much of it is quite good.

The bird trying alternative means to fly was a repeated motif along the canal.

We also went past a football stadium. That’s a big deal here.