Sunday 23rd September

A day of incidents!  It started at the first swing bridge - neither of us could unlock it!  Richard got his mole wrench and tried again and discovered that someone had cut through the chain as obviously they couldn’t unlock it either!  At the first lock we were joined by Me and Mine who was single handed and wanted a hand to get through the next swing bridge – in fact he stuck with us through two more locks.  At the second lock we found that the last people had left the bottom paddles up and locked in that position – what on earth were they thinking??  Fortunately Mr. Me and Mine noticed otherwise we could have been there all day waiting for the lock to fill up!  Next we found a boat across the canal that had pulled out its pins.  It was quite windy and the boat had been moored up with its ropes thrown round the pins instead of through them!  It was quite a job to get it back to the bank in the wind but fortunately there were 2 strong men!  We seemed to get to the top of the Rufford Branch much quicker than we went down four weeks ago in the pouring rain as today has been nice – windy but fine.

We pulled over in Burscough and went to Tesco and found a farmer’s market in Burscough Wharf which is just next to the canal.  After shopping we decided to continue on to Scarisbrick Marina as we had been told that the mooring there is quite nice.  We pulled over just passed the entrance and were really surprised to see how empty the marina is.  As far as I can see it has been open since 2009 and there were only a handful of boats in there – amazing and sad.

As we came out of Burscough there is a swing bridge which, at present, is being operated by C&RT men.  We took the opportunity to pick their brains about going into Liverpool and now feel very confident that we know the drill!