The Captain has complained that your scribe rather glossed over the last few days on the Montgomery Canal, so here are a few more pics…

Here’s a rather nice spot just up from Queen’s Head. A fine old warehouse building lurks behind the crossover bridge, but it’s followed by a tight bend, and your trusty photographer was too busy steering to snap anything else. If you click on the photo and look carefully, the blemish over the bridge is actually a buzzard.

The middle pound at Frankton Locks was indeed very low: at least a foot down, and when the available draught is only about two and half feet that kind of matters. The chap behind was a bit keen, and trying to pass the opposition traffic managed to put both of them firmly aground.

The chief cook wanted everyone to know that she really did know how to work a staircase lock, and Cracker just wanted to say hello again. He was on loan to take a historic boat down to the Canal Centre for their forthcoming canal festival weekend.

Right. Can I go back to sleep now, Sir?

Leaving Wales on the Sunday morning via Chirk Aqueduct, we had a pleasant meander back over familiar territory.

No delays at St. Martins, and reasonable weather, and by Monday afternoon we were toddling into Ellesmere Arm for a quick visit to Tesco, before nipping round the corner (boat-wise) to Blackwater Marina, ready for the engineer to do his oil changing thing on Tuesday morning. With Song & Dance tucked up on the service quay, plugged in to the mains, and Sir happy with the nearby holiday flat garden to explore, we took local advice and toddled down to the new Greek Restaurant Meze, which was indeed most excellent.

A warm sunny Tuesday in a marina must mean doing the laundry (oh the glamour). For various reasons our engineer chappy didn’t finish until mid-afternoon, and so having thoroughly fed, waterered, dieseled and emptied Song & Dance, and dried all the washing in their tumble dryer, we set sail for a long haul cruise back around the corner into the Ellesmere Arm, where the Captain was beginning to feel right at home.

We were going to head down the Montgomery canal after all the boat servicing stuff, and you need to book a passage through Frankton Locks, so we decided to stay another day and chill out before heading out into the fray again. And so Wednesday was spent pottering around the town and the mere, shopping for some birthday presents and so on.

There are plenty of nice houses in Ellesmere,

the church overlooks the Mere, and down near the water, something stirred.

One Tuesdays and Wednesdays, the local Indian Restaurant was offering a Starter, Main Course, Rice or Nan or Chips and a fizzy drink for a tenner, so it hardly seemed worth cooking, and for £20 for the two of us the food eminently acceptable. We’ll be returning to Ellesmere again in a week or so: we suspect there’ll be a repeat engagement!

Bleary eyed Friday morning proved to be a washout. It had started raining early in the morning, making a change from the duck serenade noises, and was forecast to be wet and wild all day, with a slight possibility of a clearance late afternoon. A steam train trip further into the mountains didn’t seem like a good idea, and most of the day was written off to chores around the boat. The clearance never really came until much later – a shame, because you can only moor in Llangollen for a maximum of two nights.

Saturday proved a little less wet and wild, and with Liam Heath paddling solo at lunchtime, we returned to Gales Wine Bar for some fortification, and found someone with a shiny iPad and WiFi connection who let us watch Liam going for gold. Another celebratory lunch, a visit to the next door wine shop for some more Lebanese goodies, and it was mid afternoon before we got back to the boat. We needed to get clear of Llangollen for the night, and there’s almost nowhere to moor between Llangollen and Froncysyllte, so it looked we’d be cruising well into the evening, and hoped Sir would forgive us.

And so it proved. A tortuously slow run down to Trevor Basin, with the predicted hordes heading up to Llangollen for the weekend – it would have been quicker to walk. And then a long wait because there was still a never ending stream of boats coming across The Great Unpronounceable: in the end the Head Gardener had to walk across to the other side and say “Whoa!”, so we could get across. Most of the traffic seemed to be intent on getting to Llangollen that evening: we were seriously beginning to wonder where they thought they were going to moor as we’d left an almost full basin there. Still, SEP as Douglas Adams might say.

And we finally made it back to the Biggles Jump Off spot in Froncysyllte, for a light dinner and an early night. This boating is supposed to be relaxing! Still, a worthwhile visit – think we might have to come back by surface transport and stay for a few days in Gales Hotel: a hotel with the reception in an upmarket wine shop has to be good.

Most canals are fairly static when it comes to water. Water is poured into the summit pound (and, sometimes elsewhere) to replace that “lost” when passing through a lock. As water is frequently scarce, this is the reason that emptying a full lock or filling a empty lock unnecessarily (e.g. when you’re above an empty lock, and someone is approaching from below but still a few minutes off) is considered very poor form. If you’re moored up on most canals, there is a modest movement of water in the general direction of “downhill”, but not enough to be of any real concern.

However, the Llangollen canal is used to as a feeder to transport water from the Welsh mountains in the Cerriog Valley above Llangollen at Horseshoe Falls, down to a large reservoir at Hurlestone Junction, from where it goes on to Manchester (or somewhere!).

(This picture of Horseshoe Falls, technically the start of the canal, was taken on an earlier visit in 2007).

This transporting of water means there is a considerable flow down the Llangollen Canal at all times, making it more like a river. There are two significant effects resulting from this. Firstly, each lock has a large by-wash channel which carries water down around the lock when boats are not moving through – a bit a weir on a river. For some reason here, these inevitably enter and exit the main channel just above and below the lock gates (unlike most river locks, which give you much more room), and cause major cross currents just by the lock itself. Just what you need when you’re trying to slot a 58 ft by 6ft 8in boat into a 72 ft by 7 ft brick slot without crashing into anything and destroying all the crockery.

The second effect is that while the canal is relatively wide and deep, the flow is fairly negligible, but when the canal narrows, Bernoulli’s principle means that the flow speeds up considerably. The canal narrows at every bridge hole, sometimes to little more than the width of the boat, and heading up stream you suddenly find yourself going nowhere, halfway under a bridge. And when you finally pop out the other side, the boat suddenly surges forward again.

It’s even worse in long narrow tunnels like that at Chirk, or in long narrow aqueducts. To keep going upstream, you need a significant amount of power to overcome the downhill flow and keep moving forward against the fast flow, but there’s something called prop walk which tries its hardest to screw the boat around, and in a cramped tunnel it can make it nearly impossible to track straight down the middle without scrubbing the front on one wall and the stern on the other. Deep joy. And scraped paintwork. Guaranteed.

It’s a lot easier going downhill! Or if you must go uphill, use a horse.