Nantwich

3rd-11th July 2020 – Nantwich – first stop on the Shropshire Union

We had a short sail up through the last lock on the Middlewich branch, then turned onto the Shropshire Union canal or the “Shroppy” as it’s known. In fairly short order we sailed past the turning onto the Llangollen canal and then we began our journey into new parts of the Shroppy. In the past, we’ve always gone onto the Llangollen, so all this was now new to us.

The day was a bit grey and there was quite a breeze about – just to keep me on my toes! The canal itself was lovely and very green and peaceful. We’ve noticed the number of boats we meet as we sail along is growing all the time at the moment, and this weekend will be the undoing of the staying overnight onboard restriction of lock down. This means more and more people can take to their boats and do some short trips as they can now stay over. It certainly shows and its a welcome change as the canal now feels like it is coming back to life.

We ended up at Nantwich, which is a proper old and well established canal side town. As we arrived there was an endless stream of moored boats, and we ended up grabbing a space right at the bottom end of the town. For a while we wondered if we’d get it at all. We are getting low on supplies so we really needed to stay here and walk to the Morrisons supermarket in the town.

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The next stage of our journey will be the 15 locks at Audlem! It was very lucky that, purely by chance we ended up mooring in front of Steve and Caroline when we pull in at Nantwich! What was amazing was it took us a whole day to notice!! It was absolutely awesome to catch up with them again after the winter break – they are great friends and easy company and we really enjoyed our tow path evening with a some wine and the odd beer – happy days! Of course, that will help with the 15 locks – being 4 rather than 2 even with 2 boats can help the passage through enormously. And having Steve and Caroline will make it even better.