Saltersford, Warwick

Here I am Rune

Distance 2.6 miles

Total 3791 Locks  241 Tunnels

Running total mileage 5611.2 miles

Not much mileage today, but a fair number of locks, 21 in total, all broad locks, and most were set against us so quite a bit of work to do. We passed another blogger at the top lock, Chuffed, who promised us some volunteer lockeepers on the way down, sadly they didn’t materialise except one on lock 36 (about halfway down) who lifted a paddle and opened a gate for us, but he was working with a single crewed lady going up so we were generally left to our own devices.

The only slight controversy we had was round about lock 34 where my crew advised me that there was a boat coming up from the next lock. We had already emptied the lock and I was waiting in the lock entrance for this information to come through. Once told that there was a boat coming I advised the crew of a boat coming behind me of this and set off leaving the bottom gates open. She didn’t look happy about this and as soon as I had set off began to close the gates saying that there were two boats coming down, what this misses is that by filling the lock before the boat coming up has arrived they are wasting a lockful of water. It looked as though she hadn’t taken my advice as the boat going up pulled in to moor before the lock so I changed my strategy and having until that point studiously closed the paddles and shut the gates before leaving the locks, I changed to just closing the paddles but leaving both gates wide open. Since there were the crews of two boats coming down to deal with this I just gave them a little more work to do and us slightly less😉. 

Tomorrow I would expect to get to somewhere around about Radford Semele