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.