Day 12 – Knottingly to Castleford

The crew is revolting and the captain is sulking. The weather forecast is not good. High winds and heavy rain. The rain mainly stays away but the wind bends the tops of the trees, blows dust and dirt from the builder’s yard into the boat and rattles us against the staging. Bob says he feels confident to travel in this wind. I point out that the wind has a name, Hector, and if a wind is strong enough to have a name it’s strong enough for it to be unwise to venture out onto a river. He is still sure we can make it to Leeds. I say, ‘OK you take the boat to Leeds, I’ll get a bus and meet you there’.

He sulks and I go off to do some food shopping. There is a parade of shops, I could get a wedding dress, buy Koi carp or get a suntan, pedicure and a tattoo. The only food outlet is a bakery so I buy two wholemeal hufflers (at least I think that’s what they called them) and go back to the grump on the boat.

By late afternoon the wind is easing and I agree we can move. We pass under the old A1 bridge, under the old Great North Road Bridge, past the Ferrybridge Power Stations and under the new A1 bridge. The River Aire is sheltered here, the hills of reclaimed colliery waste line the banks. Now they are planted with silver birch and alder. At intervals there are clumps of giant hogweed. They almost look like proper hills but they are too smooth and the tops are flat.  White egrets and herons flap away from the boat. It’s peaceful and pretty in the early evening sun and we are sheltered from the wind.

The locks along the Aire and Calder are huge and automated. Designed for the large commercial traffic that now hardly use them. They are often manned but today nobody is on duty, after all they didn’t expect that any boat would be idiotic enough to move when storm Hector is passing through. I like operating these locks, just turn a key, push a button and wait. The muscles I have built up doing the locks through to Nottingham are now returning to flab.

We moor up in Castleford and go to the pub. Castleford is a rugby league town, the pub landlord tells me that Castleford are at home to Hull KR on Sunday. I spent many a winter Saturday, wrapped in a red and white scarf shivering on crumbling terraces. Now Rugby League is a summer sport. I’d quite like to go and watch them but I daren’t suggest to Bob that we hang around another small South Yorkshire town for a few days just so I can watch a rugby match.

Day 11 Thorne – Knottingly

In the olden days I sometimes travelled through Thorne. I remember it as being a rather non-descript town. It still is. But a visit to the town provides food and cash and we spend a few hours trying to make the boat a bit cleaner and more presentable. The countryside and canal system beyond Thorne is rather non-descript as well. Flat land, long straight canals, electricity pylons, distant power stations There are few locks but more swing and lift bridges. All the bridges seem to operate in different ways. I learn that the best way to work them is, rather like putting Ikea furniture together, to read the instructions first. As we are only passing this way once the flat landscape, where the only hills are reclaimed spoil from mines, the remnants of industry and signs of long-gone commercial canal usage is interesting. If we had to do the passage along the Aire and Calder canal regularly it could become tedious.

At Kellingborough Colliery the old mine machinery still stands and there are acres of land covered in colliery waste. Large bollards line the edge of the wharf. Our fifteen-year-old guide warns of heavy commercial traffic but the huge barges transporting coal, sand and gravel no longer run along here. In Thorne we were told that the only large vessel on these waters is an oil tanker but that had passed by yesterday on it’s way back from the power station at Ferrybridge and was now in Goole. I don’t know whether to be sad that these boats no longer ply their trade along these waters or glad we’re not going to round a bend and meet one of the monsters.

Into Knottingly. It is a pleasant passage through a limestone cut where pink flowers grow out of the stone walls. The designated secure mooring is, less scenically, next to a builder’s yard, around the corner from the A1 and the massive cooling towers of the Ferrybridge Power Station. Well it’s supposed to be secure but somebody has nicked the padlock that locked the gate.