Under the Merseyway

Stockport is a large town in Greater Manchester with a poulation of around 135.000.

The river Tame and the River Goyt join in the centre of town to form the Mersey River.

The town centre is built on elevated ground above the river Mersey and the main shopping centre is called The Merseyway.

seeing as this is close to my home and the river is fairly easily navigated at this point me and Skydiver decided that here would be a good place for the maiden voyage of our new urbex boat.

She is a 8.5 foot Bestway inflatable dinghy.

We scouted our route and with the company of Bigjobs. alley. Little jobs and a couple of others we made our way down to the river bank. This was not as easy as it sounds - we had to walk quite a way before we got to where we wanted to launch.

on route we had to climb across outlet pipes, balance on high walls, and try not to sink into the sand banks.

We eventually got the the spot and inflated the boat.

the plan was to set out in the boat with two people one rowing and the other one paying out a line that we had tethered to a tree near the launch, once we got to the other side we would tie off the line and it would serve as a guide for the next trips across - we could also pull the boat along instead of rowing.

Me and Bigjobs set of on the maiden voyage, all went well for about 10 feet until the line I was paying out got tangled. The current was pretty strong and was trying to drag us further down the river, putting quite a lot of pressure on the rope that I was trying to untangle. We managed to get downstream far enough to be under the shopping centre and on the other side of the river - we tied off and Bigjobs left me alone in the dark while he went back for the others.

After about an hour of ferrying people across we were all ready to go for a mooch.

We wabdered around under the centre of Stockport for about 3 hours or so, I didn't have a decent camera with me so i didn't take many shots and those that I did take were so bad that I deleted most of them :)

When we were ready to go, Skydiver and Alley decided to take the first trip back. They were already in the boat when I noticed that they were in a spot that had lots of steel reinforcing bars just under the surface of the water - I had just started the sentence telling them to be careful when I heard the dinghy pop. it didn't so much go pssss as WOOSH, so I knew it was a pretty big hole.

After a few moments panic trying to get Skydiver, Alley and the bags of equipment out of the boat before it sank, we kinda just looked at each other for a moment.

We had a spare boat, but it was on the other side of the bank up-river about 300yards, the water was freezing and it was 1o'clock in the morning.....

We went through numerous ideas, including Alley wanting to try one of the firs doors that may have ended in us being trapped in the indoor shopping centre with alarms going off!

Then we remembered that we had the patch that came with the dinghy, I had put it in my pocket when we took the boat of out the box....it was a small self-adhesive patch, not much bigger then the hole we had made - I didn't hold out much hope......

We dried the dinghy as much as we could and applied the patch - we then had to wait for half an hour for it to cure......after the alloted time we tried to blow the dinghy up and.... it WORkED!!

I couldn't believe it - the dinghy had failed on it's maiden voyage but we had been saved by a little self adhesive bit of plastic! JOY.

I must email Bestway and see if I can get a stock of these things!

It was a fun night, but a stressful one too - by the end, after a call at McDonald's where Skydiver did a Drive thru drive-by, I was cold hungry and knackered - pretty standard for an urbex trip then eh?

Again, I appogise for the quality, or lack of, in the photos. They are unedited because they are that bad, what is the point? LOL