Engine Arm,Smethwick

Here I am Rune

Distance 6.2 miles

Total 884 Locks 46 Tunnels

Running total mileage 1290.6miles

It was pleasant enough cruise along the BCN Old Main Line today bringing us to Engine Arm. I must say however that I am not a big fan of the mile and a half that you travel below the M5 motorway. Up to that point the Old Main Line is OK but that section is just noisy and heavily industrial. I’m sure that when they built the M5 above the canal they could have straightened out some of the unnecessary kinks as well. Blakely Hall Bridge is the one that comes to mind where it is nigh on impossible to line the boat up properly for the bridge hole as the right hand canal side pushes out (you may gather from this that I brushed it as I entered the bridge hole!).

Being back onto the main BCN system we are now back to the scenario of spending half our time down the weed hatch removing stuff wrapped around the propeller. Today’s efforts were several large pieces of plastic. Tomorrow we will be heading in towards Birmingham City Centre via the Soho Loop (one of the few bit we haven’t done yet). The weather forecast is for sun but remaining pretty cold.  


To help deal with the cold, we did manage to collect some more kindling from Engine Arm, although there was a bit of a misjudgement in how much to collect. Last time I cut up three wooden pallets which filled three bags of kindling so this time, thinking I’ll probably only need one bag I only cut up one pallet. The one pallet however obviously contained more wood than I first realised since we again have three bags of kindling which will probably last us the rest of this winter and sometime into next winter!