Whatever’s happened to Firecrest
2024 was a difficult year. We got stuck on the wrong side of the Macclesfield breach, (the 2023 one at Scholar’s Green)
then just as we got moving again mum died unexpectedly, there were more breaches blockages, flooding and landslides hindering our plans to spend the summer on the mid levels around East Anglia,
and when we finally got to Northampton, the powers that be were playing politics about dredging around Salters Lode lock – which meant that we couldn’t get to Cambridge anyway. So a change of plan took us across country through Warwickshire
and into Gloucestershire to get to Sharpness.
That was an exciting new location for us and we’re very glad we did it. The remainder of the year saw us travelling up the Severn,
and the Shropshire union for the autumn.
to reach Chester in November.
We were booked in to have Firecrest repainted at the Paint Shed (Uplands Marina, near the Anderton Boat lift) in March so we knew we wanted to overwinter close enough to negotiate any potential closures planned or otherwise, so we booked ourselves into the marina from January. Just in time to get frozen in
I left Eric tinkering on the boat whilst I went home for some family time. After all the emotional upheavals we faced in 2024 I was drained. But after a minor delay in starting the repaint we have all emerged shiny and energised to start afresh. Of course in true narrowboating tradition our plans to cruise the Leeds and Liverpool canal west to east have been thwarted, first by the catastrophic breach on the Bridgewater canal over NewYear, and then by the breach two weeks ago on the Macc, our plan B route. Yes we could go across to the River Trent and go north that way, we may still opt to do that . There’s still a lot of family stuff going on which we need to prioritise but for now we are celebrating being back out on the cut listening to the rain on our shiny new paint work, what colours did we choose.
