Shirley

 

Here I am Rune

Distance 6.2 miles 

Total 5346 Locks  445 Tunnels

Running total mileage 8092.7 miles

 

A very pleasant Autumnal cruise along the North Stratford Canal today. Originally the weather forecast for today didn’t look too optimistic, but the rain came early in the morning and the rest of the day has been generally fine and sunny. For such a good day for cruising, there weren’t many boats on the move, only two and one of them was only moving ‘cos we were towing it! A couple of heritage boats passed us on our mooring last night and we caught up with one of them poling past a moored boat just as you leave Hockley Heath obviously with a bit of a problem. Spoke to them and it appears there was both a problem with the engine and something around the prop. The second heritage boat seemingly hadn’t realised there was a problem and had gone on ahead so was about a mile further up the canal and they were trying to bow haul the second boat up to it. Seemed only reasonable to offer them a tow (might need someone to give me a tow someday) so hitched it up and towed it up the canal to the second heritage boat. They are supposedly going to the Black Country Museum for a meeting of heritage boats so I hope that they can either get the engine and prop fixed, or the second boat can tow him to it. My ‘good deed’ for the day done anyway!

We didn’t get quite back to where we moored on Monday night, found another mooring just short of that where there was armco. Tomorrow, all things going to plan, we hope to be back in Birmingham.

 

Quick update;- the boat we towed has just come past us at 4.55pm still heading towards Brum. It was called 'Buckden' and is currently running on one cylinder!! 

Hockley Heath

 

Here I am Rune 

Distance 6.6 miles 

Total 5346 Locks  445 Tunnels

Running total mileage 8086.5 miles

 

Gone down the North Stratford canal as far as bridge 27 Winding hole, if we go further than that we’d have to go down the Lapworth Flight and that wasn’t part of the plan. The canal has remained quite shallow so speed has been well down, but if in a rush a narrow boat isn’t the way to travel. Not much of note happened today, other than appreciation of just how attractive this canal is with it’s multitude of oak trees. At the moment there is a lot of duckweed but that  doesn’t impede progress much. The one other thing making the trip down here worthwhile (besides the pleasant canal) is a stop off at the Wedges Bakery at bridge 20, their bread is fabulous!

Tomorrow, weather permitting, the plan is to go back more or less to where we were last night before heading back into Birmingham on Thursday.

Shirley

 

Here I am Rune

Distance 9.7 miles 

Total 5346 Locks  445 Tunnels

Running total mileage 8079.9 miles

 

Finally moved off out of Birmingham down the Worcester and Birmingham Canal to Kings Norton Junction and then along the North Stratford. Met a few boats on the move today, invariably meeting them at the worst possible points. The most egregious point being when we were turning into the North Stratford at Kings Norton. Boat coming the other way wanted to turn towards Birmingham and a hire boat coming down behind us was going straight on towards Worcester. We managed to sort ourselves out though.

I had originally intended to go a bit further along the North Stratford but it looked like we were going to arrived at Shirley Drawbridge at about 4.45pm and, given the number of times the local motorists seem to have hit the bridge in recent months, decided that discretion being the better part of valour, leaving it until tomorrow morning looked a better option.

There didn’t seem to be a lot of depth in the canal once we were beyond Bournville as we were often scraping the bottom, and once onto the North Stratford we were getting quite a bit of rudder vibration which tends to be an indication of shallow water, hope it doesn’t get any worse.