Here I am Rune
Distance 4.6 miles
Total 621 Locks 20 Tunnels
Running total mileage 914 miles
At long last we have reached the Llangollen Canal, and it
seems every bit as attractive as I remember it to be. The first choice of
overnight mooring left a little to be desired however since as we were mooring
the local farmer was muck spreading in a nearby field, thought about it for
about 30 seconds and moved onto the second choice of overnight mooring, fresh
country air, you can’t beat it!!
I have previously read about problems at Hurleston Locks but
couldn’t remember any difficulties when we have taken hire boats through, they obviously weren’t as deep a draught as RUNE though since when we
reached the third lock up the flight I couldn’t get out of the lock over the
top cill. Put a bit more water in the pound from the next lock helped a bit but
I still couldn’t get out under power, solved the problem by pulling her out on
ropes which was a bit of a faff. The bottom lock was also quite interesting as,
by all accounts, it is the narrowest lock on the system, and I can well believe
it. Whilst one side of the boat was touching the lock wall, there was only a 2
inch gap on the other side. Felt a bit surprised that there didn’t seem to be
much obvious warning of this, particularly as when we had gone through some
paired locks on the Trent and Mersey there was a clear warning that if your
boat was more than 6 feet 10 inches wide you had to use the alternative lock. When
I later went back to take photos of the lock flight I then saw that there WAS a
warning of the extremely narrow locks but it was in smaller print on the ‘WELCOME
TO THE LLANGOLLEN CANAL’ (see photo).
Tomorrow it will be just to press on up the canal, the board
by the Hurleston Top Lock advises that it is about 21 hours cruising to get to
Llangollen, still makes me wonder how, as an 18 year old with a gang of mates
we managed to get from Wolverhampton to Llangollen and back in a fortnight, ah,
the fitness of youth.
 |
| Note the smaller Maximum Beam warning! |
 |
| The narrowest lock on the entire system |
 |
| Three of the four Hurleston Flight locks |
No comments:
Post a Comment