Thursday 18 October 2018

Dudley, Black Country Museum


Here I am  Rune
Distance  6.2 miles
Total 3450 Locks  195 Tunnels
Running total mileage 5017.0 miles

After overnighting at Engine Arm, we’ve moved around to the Black Country Museum Moorings at Dudley for tonight. A reasonably pleasant trip although I do bore easily when stuck travelling under the M5 for about a mile and a half, not the most scenic part of the system. We didn’t get off to a good start either since almost immediately as we moved off from the Engine Arm Visitor Mooring we gathered up a plastic coal sack around the propeller that required a dive down the weed hatch to remove. Interestingly one of the long term moorers there had said yesterday that someone else had set off from the moorings and run into the wall of a building adjacent to the canal as he’d got something around his prop when moving off as well. Fortunately we didn’t hit anything it was just the buggeration factor of it.

Tomorrow we’ll be back off through Netherton Tunnel to Hawne Basin, apparently we need to go before Saturday since CRT are closing the tunnel between 10am and 1pm for some canoe event. Interestingly I was reading a short history of the tunnel and apparently at one time it was lit by gaslamps, I wonder who thought that was a good idea. Despite the fact that gaslight doesn’t really put out that much light (I can speak from immediate experience since there is a gaslight outside of the Black Country Museum that we can see from where we are moored) but a gas leak inside a tunnel doesn’t really bear thinking about!

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