Navigation, Gypsies, Robbery and a Certified Apple Fan!

We started day 2 of our canal adventure with a half-hour walk up to the old Wedgwood factory - the parking lot is full of weeds, and the train station there (appropriately named Wedgwood Station) is now closed.  A big new housing development is underway - not sure what will happen with the factory, but it’s quite large.  I haven’t been able to get on the internet to find out what’s up with Wedgwood - I suspect their business has been destroyed by product coming from China.  

Looking at the Wedgwood sign from a farm

We cruised up the canal about 4 hours, and 6 sets of locks to Etruria Junction, where we had to make a hairpin turn from the Trent & Mersey Canal onto the Caldon Canal.  Lo and Behold - there is a Canal Boat Festival happening and there are crowds galore.  (Read:  audience for our clumsy, novice ability with a 45-foot boat!)  Glen was amazing - despite several boats being in our way, and having to shift around them, he managed the turn without hitting anything or anyone!  There was a gypsy dance group performing at the festival - fun for me to watch while Glen manoeuvred the boat.

Really bad picture of the gypsy dancers :-)

We were in the busy area of Stoke-on-Trent in Staffordshire, and had been warned not to stop overnight in the area to avoid potential problems.  We stopped further out where it seemed quiet, had a snack, locked up the boat and went for our evening walk.  When we returned to the boat a half hour later - the door was open!  Uh oh.  Sure enough, my laptop, the iPad and my iPhone were all missing, along with both our backpacks, my wallet, Glen’s jacket and razor.  Yes, the razor - ummm, that’s weird.  Fortunately, they had missed Glen’s phone, so we called 911 and had a bobby onsite within about 15 minutes.  I logged onto his iPhone to access the Find My iPhone, and BINGO - we had the thief pinpointed!  The bobby was on the radio immediately, had a car and a helicopter out to help him intercept the guy, had the ‘Scene of Crime’ department on their way to fingerprint the doors and items in the boat, and within a half hour, known criminal Steven Shankford had been caught with all our items.

The SOC people got a footprint off the door as well as some fingerprints off my backup drive (which the thief took out of my bag and left behind?!?)  We had to wait until the next morning to get our things back - they had to be processed through ‘evidence’.  The police actually delivered them back to our boat, and made a remarkable effort to get it done quickly so we could carry on with our trip.  HUGE kudos to constable Keith Jervis who celebrated his birthday with a big arrest, and sure helped our evening turn out better than we thought it was going to.  

"Evidence Tag" taken off my backpack
when it was returned.

So as my brother-in-law David says, “Don’t thieves know you can’t steal an iPhone?”  Thank you Apple!  The police said they doubted they would ever have caught the guy without having the positioning information!

The end to this story - the thief was processed through the court system the next day (!!!!), pleaded guilty and is now serving time - constable Andrea Jeffrey, who returned all our stuff, called us the next day to give us the update.  These Brits are efficient!