harleyj

Given that he was watching people do the lock to learn how to do locks and single handing I think your assumption is quite correct.

While travelling the canals this year we have met some interesting and wonderful people and made some wonderful new friends. But yesterday I met someone completely lost. This gentleman had just bought his boat from Nantwich and on his first day out I met him at the bottom lock at Hurlston. Nothing strange in that, but when I asked him where he was heading, he astounded me by saying he was heading to "Ripon". I said I think you are going the wrong way, but he assured me someone had told him that the shortest way to get there was via the Llangollen. I eventually convinced him to turn around. I was laughing so much when I caught up with my wife at the bridge that I didn't even get the boats name. Made my day!

As we all know, absence makes the heart grow fonder, and after nearly three years not being able to enjoy this remarkable system we are back and loving it.

I would love to visit our boat, but just a bit far to drop in for the day. On a more serious note we are booked to fly in on 30/5/21 subject to our government getting there a@#s into gear and getting us vaccinated. Keeping our fingers crossed.

While we are locked away on the other side of the world we have watched lots of vlogs on this subject and were contemplating going down this path ourselves. One of the vloggers stated that CRT had even given them instructions how to package their poo to dispose of correctly. Obviously there is conflicting information out there having read the CRT posting this morning.

There used to be one at Lymm on the Bridgewater.

Just an update on my original topic. After getting a few replies that basically told me what we already knew that canalboat life is one of the safest places to be in the UK during a pandemic. Not many of you will know that there is only one country(not Russia, China or North Korea) that will not let it's citizens leave without special permission because of covid, Australia. Just after I started this topic with the replies that I recieved, I made my submission for exemption from the travel ban, very much thinking we had no chance. Much to my surprise on Sunday we received an email from our government granting permission. Sadly due to a shoulder issue I may need an operation in the next few weeks so this year is out but the exemption is transferable so we at least can soon start booking our flights for March 2021.

We caught one in 2018 on the same bridge, a bloke. Told him he needed his eyes checked. Gongoozlers loved it, even cheered when he got stuck, idiot.

Dr Bob you have your mask in the wrong spot!

Having a smaller population we have carried out far more testing per capita than in the UK and we in the West have been locked off from the rest of Australia for months and are approaching level five conditions here which means apart from borders being closed we are nearly back to normal. We are having 50% crowds to football games from Thursday and if there hadn't been a spike in Victoria we would have been at level 5 on Saturday. I read blogs and watch vlogs and on here of course and until I started this thread I had only heard of one probable(Rich from "Floating Our Boat") so apart from my submition to our "great" leaders I was just curious to hear from forum members. One of the side effects of all the social distancing, hand sanitizing etc is even though we are in the middle of our winter our friends and us have seen virtually no colds or flu this year.

Hopefully there aren't any others.

How many times have your public health mob been right, probably as many times as ours.

Just want a rough idea.

We are currently unable to leave our country apart from special circumstances and I am putting together a submission for us to be able to get to our boat. We have not heard of any liveaboards contracting the virus but wanted to let our government know some loose figures.

We are hoping to come back if not this year then March next year. We also paid £95 to get to watch AFL(Australian football) while we were supposed to be in the UK for six months. One game we watched before the season was postponed and now we are back home we can watch most games for free. Another one for the stiff s#@t book!