Lyra's Travels

Daniel visits us at Piccadilly Village, Manchester

Passing through The Rochdale 9

Nearly finished The Rochdale 9

Monday 15th August
On Saturday evening we decided not to try and get to Castlefields on Sunday but to meet Damon, Liz and Daniel here at Piccadilly Village. This proved to be a good decision as the locks would have taken us a long time and a lot of effort.
They duly arrived, after a slight scare on the motorway when the car started to overheat. They then took us in the car to a Harvester for lunch and afterwards we took a little trip on the boat just to give Daniel a taste of the water life.
When we returned to the village we decided to moor up in the basin, which is all part of the Piccadilly complex, where one of the residents asked if we would like to join them for an afternoon street party. What a great place this is.
This morning we set off to tackle the 9 locks down into Castlefields. When we got to the top lock we found it chained up. A quick call to BW and they told us that it was stopped for maintenance for a couple of hours but someone would come and open it in a few hours.
It only took them about an hour for a BW man to turn up and unlock so we were off. This must be the hardest 9 locks on the system. Several of the pounds are flooded by the water pouring over the gates, so wet feet are the order of the day. The flooding also makes the gates very difficult to open. Because space is limited, some of the locks have an ingenious, if crude, chain mechanism to pull the gates open where there isn't  enough room for  full size beams. We finally made ot to the bottom and are now safely tied up in Castlefields where we will stop at least until Wednesday. I'm looking forward to visiting the Science and Industry Museum where there is an exhibition of custom Harley Davidson bikes.