After a pleasant Thursday doing not much at Westport Lakes, on Friday morning we’d planned to head off up the Caldon Canal to remind ourselves of why it was such a bad idea in a shiny boat like the newly prettified Song & Dance. However, doing the pre-flight checks, a significant problem in the drive shaft neck of the woods was spotted…

Quite how this was missed yesterday by the engineers during the launch is open to speculation. Photos were taken on the mobile, and driven over to Piper Boats, who expressed a suitable degree of embarrassment.

Leaving the car with them and hitching a lift back with the engineer sent to fix matters, and dodging torrential thunderstorms, by the time everything was sorted it was a bit late to head off. And so on Saturday morning we headed back initially to Festival Park… only half a mile, but we were pointing in the wrong direction. By the time we’d trekked the couple of miles up to the winding hole at Harecastle Tunnel then come back again, it was late morning when we reached the delights of Festival Park.

And by the time we’d been up to the out-of-town shopping area, got lost in B&Q, dodged some more heavy rain showers by ducking into a Pizza Hut for lunch (shock, horror), made a significant raid on Morrisons, then carried the spoils back to the boat, it was bit late to be starting out up the Caldon Canal – the first decent places to moor are some way up – and the weather still looked fairly rubbish. So we went to the cinema instead – just a few hundred yards from the boat – for an early evening showing of Atomic Blonde, which garnered rather mixed reviews but proved a suitably enjoyable mindless diversion for a damp Saturday early evening. We’re getting nowhere very fast here!