We were out of Keadby Lock at 0610 on a beautiful morning,. We knew the procedure now for coming out into the tide.....let the tide take you before you begin to gently turn.....not too much power to start with, so all went smoothly and we were soon passing under Keadby bridge. Now that the Navvygator program is working properly it is useful at times like this as we could keep an eye on our speed and adjust accordingly to reach West Stockwith at 0810, which we had been told was slack water.
The trip down was pleasant enough apart from the aggravating fact that the wind was against the tide making it slightly choppy.....there is not a vast amount of interest down the river. I had hoped that going so early the wind would not have had a chance to get going but this was not the case.
We were doing a little over 6 1/2 mph ground speed most of the way and reached West Stockwith at about 0815. We checked with the lock keeper as to the state of the water. She said it had ceased flowing but advised us to turn into what little was left anyway so we took her advice.
Once turned around for the approach it was evident that it had not ceased flowing and the approach was not as easy as we had anticipated. However Geoff managed it OK with only a small bump of our front fender on the wall as we coaxed Petroc to turn in. The tide was nowhere near as much as Selby had been, but we did not have the gentle straight in approach that we had been led to believe would be our lot if we timed our arrival.
Still we were in and it was a smooth ride up to the West Stockwith basin and the start of the Chesterfield Canal.......lovely canals for a few weeks.
Sue, the lock keeper said it was Ok to stay here for the weekend and directed us to a linear mooring on the offside just through the bridge.
We then had a very lazy day after our somewhat early start, even for us! Geoff walked into nearby Misterton, about a mile, for the paper and to suss out the Church for tomorrow. There is a Church here in West Stockwith but no service tomorrow.
The temperature was quite high so most of the day was a case of finding the coolest place and I had to resort to two cold showers to revive myself! I decided I could not cope with the oven on in these temperatures so we went to one of the local pubs for a meal. Not the one in the basin as we had been told it was expensive. The other one was OK but nothing to write home about....However I did not have to cook it so that was a big plus.
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