New Junction to Selby

Saturday 16th June 2017

New Junction To Beal

We woke up this morning to clear blue skies and glorious sunshine, we took our time preparing to set off to Beal and enjoyed a leisurely breakfast in the sun.

We headed off back up the Aire and Calder towards Knottingley  where we did a sharp u-turn onto the short stretch to Bank Dole lock.

Bank Dole was the first hand operated lock we had experienced for sometime and took a fair bit of effort to get through.

This lock drops onto the River Aire, the river meanders all over the place here and the cooling towers of Eggborough seemed to jump from bank to bank and from front to back, all very confusing.

Its only a short run to Beal lock where a pontoon provides safe moorings, there is water here too,

We stayed the night here and were joined late on by two other boats so it was just as well we arrived early.

We decided to eat at the Kings Arms only to find that this pub, once famous for its food, has fallen victim to the greed of the owners stripping the profits from the success of the hard work of the landlord. A very limited menu was available and the current landlord is moving on elsewhere. I hope that the pub continues to operate in the future and doesn't go the way of so many canal-side pubs. 

Sunday 17th June 2017

Beal to Selby

Another hot and sunny day so again we took our time setting off having filled with water.

The river below the lock continues its winding course with several "hairpin" bends to negotiate, further confusing the sense of direction.

This section of river is used by water skiers and wake boarders and we had our otherwise calm trip thrown into an exciting tumult of high waves through which we ploughed on our course towards West Haddersley.

The beautiful start of the Selby Canal 

Here we reach the entrance to the Selby canal with a large flood lock to negotiate. The Selby canal is always quite and very pretty, however as always there was a lot of weed to deal with as we passed along, having to reverse the prop may times to clear the weed, the canal is also quite shallow in several places so with a combination of the extra load on the engine and the intense heat we had to keep an eye on the running temperature as it had begun to creep up. 

We eventually reached the basin in Selby, we were the only visiting boat so had no problem in finding a mooring.

We are here until Friday then moving the boat to the boat yard where it is coming out of the water for blacking and a few maintenance jobs.