Lapworth

Here I am Rune

Distance 6.4 miles

Total 4946 Locks  335 Tunnels

Running total mileage 7,317.1 miles

 

As planned, we’ve cleared the Lapworth Flight of locks so no more locks all the way back to Hawne Basin (except the guillotine stop lock at Kings Norton that is always open anyway). A bit of a damp start to the day with rain in the air but we stopped for lunch at Kingswood Junction, the weather passed through and we had a fine run up the Lapworth flight. The only real difficulty was around locks 10 and 11 where the pounds were unfortunately quite a bit down and I couldn’t get over the cill out of the lock, or into the next lock. We had a lock volunteer following us up assisting a single crewed boat but he’d have been better off going on ahead and running some water down. We started with the single crewed boat 4 locks behind us but it wasn’t until they were just one lock behind that the lockie realised there was a problem after I’d told him my crew had gone on ahead three locks to run some more water down.

We got to the top at about 4.10pm which is the time we would normally want to stop on a Sunday, so all pretty much going to plan.