An interesting night! Millie seemed to come and go all night – in and out like a yoyo! Each time she tucked into her food her identity disc knocked on her china dish – note to self, buy a plastic dish! Also having her on the bed means there doesn’t seem to be enough duvet to go round as she lies in between us and pins it to the bed!
We left about 9.30am and headed up to the scary locks of Kirkstall, Forge Three Rise and Newlay Three Rise. I say scary as we had heard all sorts of horror stories about the local children ambushing passing boats! C&RT lock the gates from 3pm to 8.15am and they man the locks too. One lock keeper, who came to the UK 8 years ago to get away from the troubles in Zimbabwe and South Africa, told us they he had been shot at a few times and his car is always getting dinked by pellets! As there were two 3 rise or triple locks Richard was confined to the boat this time as we really didn’t want a repetition of him flooding the towpath as he had on the Chesterfield Canal! We did the first set of locks on our own but the second set were done with another boat, Bubbles, and then we helped each other through 3 swing bridges before tying up for lunch.
After lunch we had Dobson 2 Rise to negotiate and it was chaos! There was a wide beam trip boat coming down and there were too many people trying to work ground and gate paddles! Still somehow they got through with water egressing the boat from the back (you can see from the photo just how much the gates leaked). We got up though the water has spoilt my flowers on the bow :-( The next locks were Field 3 Rise where there was a lock keeper which was just as well as, once again, there was a lot of leakage and the locks were operated slightly differently from usual.
We pulled over just after Field locks for the night. It was a lovely start to the evening but then the rain started.
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