Boatdate: 18072020
Location: Burscough

It looks set to rain most of today. It's a persistent penetrating sort of rain that soaks you through in no time. Mid morning, Derek's massive fuel barge (0783742858) sails by heading south and 50 metres on stops, dead in the water.

 The crew angle the barge across the canal so that the stern is hard up against the bank. Turns out there is about 15 metres of steel wire cored brush wrapped tight round his prop. It's sort of like a drain or flu cleaning rod and very long and very tough. Even the barge's big Gardner engine can't chop that up. The crew drain the water ballast tank from the rear of the boat so the prop is more accessible. Then they are half in and half out the water leaning down trying to clear the mess up with a pair of bolt cutters. It takes over two hours to get it all off. It was so wet you might well as just climb in the canal to do it. 

While the crew is clearing the prop I buy some diesel off Derek so his morning isn't entirely wasted. He looks as if he's been on that boat for all of its 80yrs. In fact, he has two of them, but even so it's hard to make ends meet working them up and down the canal every three weeks supplying diesel, solid fuel and gas to all the boats. Their schedule has been sorely delayed by this mishap and later in the day they pass us by once more having turned round at Scarisbrick.

For the rest of the day we mooch about Burscough and will overnight here as friends from Lancaster will join us tomorrow.