It had to happen, of course. You don't get the highs if you don't have the lows. For the first time I missed the warmth of my London flat. I missed being clean and going to restaurants with friends. I missed the buzz of the office and the cynical chat of journalists in the boozer behind it. But if this last week has seen my nadir then let's leave it at that for fear of enraging the fates and furies unleashed, I suspect, by Vectra man, whom I mentioned so disparagingly last in connection with swing bridges.

For it's the swing bridges of the Leeds and Liverpool Canal that have been my undoing, so this week I begin with a plea to anyone that can explain the logic of constructing a canal with so many swing bridges whose operating mechanisms are on the opposite side of the navigation to the towpath.

When the early civil engineers cut their way through the country building the waterways that stoked the fires of the industrial revolution 200 years ago, there was much local negotiation about accommodating the needs of landowners and farmers through whose property the canals sliced a swathe. So canals, unlike rivers, say, have thousands of 'accommodation' bridges built to enable passage from one side of the water to the other. This naturally involved not just the bridge itself but embanking its approaches too.

One way of cutting costs was to build the bridge at the lower end of a lock where the lie of the land would provide natural banking. But where there were no locks another way was to create a lifting bridge, usually a simple wooden platform hinged on one side of the cut with the opposite side connected by chains to overhead beams pivoting on tall posts and counter-balanced against the weight of the platform to make it relatively easy to raise.

A third way, to coin a phrase with about as much success as the original, adopted in the 1770s by Leeds and Liverpool engineer John Longbothom on the Yorkshire side of the canal, was a simple swing bridge only a foot or so above the water level balanced on a pivot so that it could be swung horizontally out of the way to allow passage of boats along the canal. But what was the thinking in pivoting the bridge on the opposite side to the towing path?

Imagine it: two men, or a husband and wife, are working a boat; one leads the horse on the towing path, the other steers the boat. When you get to one of these bridges, what do you do? Presumably, the steerer had to land on the mechanism side, swing the bridge open to the cut, get back on the boat, get towed through steering the while, land again and close it. But what if, as happens on the Leeds and Liverpool, there is no easy way of landing opposite to the towing path because the bank is broken or built up too high or the canal is too shallow?

These days substitute Dobbin and his handler for a trusty BMC 1.8 diesel engine and you have the same problem. Coming up from Leeds I just about managed the first four hand-swung bridges, sometimes having to co-opt Sunday ramblers and even anglers. But none were on hand to operate the electric mechanism of Apperley Bridge while the road it carried was full of a stream of Sunday motorists. It took me a good half an hour of psyching myself and figuring out how to scramble over fences and up walls before closing the road barriers, opening the bridge, getting the boat through, closing the bridge, and opening the barriers to the traffic, lines of which had built up on both sides.

And there were 33 of these wretches in front of me so having passed through an adjacent two-rise staircase lock I decided to call it a day at about 4.30pm and moor up for the night. The fine weather Ièd been so lucky with had broken a few days before (approaching Leeds the wind had been so strong on the wide reaches of the Aire and Calder Navigation it was creating waves that seemed a foot high and the spray from Stealawayès bow was so forceful it passed the whole 45ft length of the boat before hit me square on at the tiller). It was raining so a 'nice cup of tea' in front of the fire was much more alluring than pressing on to meet self-imposed targets. I figured I'd wait till the morrow when I could join up and convoy with another boat.

But it was not to be. During the night the wind rose fiercely and by morning it was howling down the dale of the River Aire from the hills beyond. Nothing moved the whole day and it would have been madness for me to try on my own with the gale making Stealaway very difficult to control, especially at slow speeds. So I polished a bit of brass, read, ate and imagined being stuck for days. The weather forecasts were not good.

Gloom was still around the next day. Nothing moved all morning and I seriously thought about abandoning the L&L, retracing my path back to Leeds and crossing the Pennines via the hard grind of the newly reopened Huddersfield Canal, with its 74 locks in just 20 miles. But then the wind abated a little and the showers tended back towards the perpendicular with the ground. Better still, just after midday, two boats arose like magic out of the lock and would be happy for me to trail them.

Ah, joy returns! And the good news kept coming. A narrowboat rally - not usually my thing at all - is planned for this weekend in Skipton and there should for the rest of the week be a steady stream of craft heading north that I could tag along with. And so it is with pleasure that I sit here just above the Bingley Five-Rise, having been ushered up 60ft through the daunting structure by legendary lock keeper Barry Whitelock.

Which is good as this a magnificent canal: from vibrant Leeds whose Saturday shoppers serenaded by flamenco buskers and exhilarated by the pounding rhythms of the city's percussion orchestra put London's Oxford Street to shame, it has climbed 240ft in less than 15 miles through the wooded slopes, carpeted with the shimmering gauze of millions of bluebells, of Airedale. The river itself, which it left in Leeds, is now far below the line of the cut, and the land is starting to open out to the purple hills on the horizon.

Already, I hear the clatter of the paddle ratchets as Barry brings the first of the day's craft through the Five Rise and I feel the urge to move on. By this time next week, I should be close to the newly re-opened Anderton boat lift (a more water-thrifty solution of raising boats from one level to another. And if I still feel the need for some journalistic natter then old muckers in Manchester and Liverpool are on hand.

· Mike Holland is writing weekly online dispatches from his canal journey around England. Thanks to the wonders of wireless technology, you can email him at michael.holland4@btinternet.com