Would you believe it.

The seven Barrowford locks went quite well till leaving the last one a fender that was hanging over the side caught in the lock gate and nearly ripped the solar panels off the roof. We carried on through Nelson and Burnley, the over heating was giving us trouble. If we kept at 1400rpm we seemed ok. This continued so we called in at Reedley Marina to see if they could sort it our. They directed us to Knotts Bridge boatyard and ask for Steve. Arriving there around four o clock we had to wait for the engine to cool down so Steve could look at it. He bled the air out of the system and sent us on a test run,unfortunately the problem persisted. It was now eight o clock so we stayed the night.next morning Steve came and discovered a small leak in some pipe joints,so he tightened every thing up and told me to run the engine out of gear to see if that had fixed it. It hadn't,while trying to puzzle it out Steve noticed that the temperature gauge was rising and falling at intervals. It's an electrical fault he declared where is the sender,he found it and found the nut was lose,he tightened it and the problem was solved. Just one small nut causing all that trouble. We thanked him and paid him then left,only we were pointing the wrong way after our test run. While turning at the first wide spot in the canal we picked up a blue plastic sack in the propeller. Into the weed hatch armed with scissors to cut it away. Finally we were on our way again through Hapton and claton-Le-Moors and twisting our way through Church. The plan was to moor before entering Blackburn,however, we could find nowhere suitable. We asked some people in a boat coming out of Blackburn if there was some where to moor up ahead. They told us to moor at the top of the flight of locks. On arrival at the locks(it was now five o clock)there was no mooring. We defended the six locks and headed out of Blackburn. It had been hot and hard work. We finally moored at seven o clock,shattered. Today we have had no problems except the rain. We left at ten and arrived at the seven lock Johnson's Hill flight and found our selves sharing with a small cruiser,he was very nervous going into the locks with us. All went well part from the heavy downpour which soaked us all. We moored outside Botany Bay for lunch and stayed for the night. Botany Bay is a shopping centre in an old mill just off the M61 at Chorley.