Here I am Rune
Distance 11.8 miles
Total 4239 Locks 269 Tunnels
Running total mileage 6,482.1 miles
For what was probably the last cruise of the year, we picked a day when it rained for half of it, but never mind. The number of times we’ve cruised from Birmingham City Centre to Hawne Basin I’d image the boat could almost steer itself there by now. Pretty much nothing on the move today except us even though the rain didn’t really come in until we turned onto the Netherton Tunnel branch, so fortunately we had some respite through the tunnel itself (except when passing under the air shafts). I was a bit puzzled between the 3rd and 4th air shaft in that there was the smell of woodsmoke in the tunnel and the tunnel light was casting a beam through thin smoke. I have no idea where this smoke came from in the middle of the tunnel, there were no other boats besides us in the tunnel, I can only assume that somehow it had draw smoke in from the ground level above us.
We sadly ground to a halt between Totnal Bridge and Waterfall Lane bridge with a huge sheet of plastic wrapped around the propeller. It was so thick I had to take a saw to it to cut it off, which held us up for about 20 minutes. The passage through Gorsty Tunnel was made more ‘pleasurable’ by the presence of a lot of leaves in the canal, so there was a lot of stopping and reversing to clear the propeller, but we eventually got through and back to the basin.
By my reckoning we’ve been out for about 4 1/2 months and covered something like 670 miles, social distancing all the way!
