Phew!

We're on a mission. Got to get from Mercia Marina to Stone in three days. So it's been a long day. We've done the distance it took us two days to cover the other way last weekend. There wasn't a lot of traffic – we only had to queue once.

However, most of the locks were set against us. Pretty as many of them are, a lot of them were very stiff to work – both paddles and gates.

The journey included the section where the canal joins the River Trent, which has some interesting features. Here you are directed out to the right under the bridge…

Then you find yourself in a section where many little branches of the river stream in to the main channel, passing under foot bridges…

Eventually you reach the main weir where the river runs off to the south. This was the curve around which, last weekend, a boat was coming fast the other way (the way we were coming today), as I blogged then.

And this was, we think, the submerged tree into which it forced us, still caught there

We've met the usual mix of people along the way – friendly boaters, gongoozlers at Fradley, and a couple of boaters about to come down the lock we were coming up who just watched as we did all the work – left a bad taste in the mouth, that did. But mostly the day went really well and we're on target for Stone by Sunday evening.