Loads o locks

• Moving

A few days ago, we moored up at the top of the Tardebigge flight on locks of the Worcester and Birmingham canal. Our friends Rob and Susan were due to come up them the next day – 30 locks in this flight alone. So, we walked down to the bottom and helped Copperkins ll (their narrowboat) come all the way up.

A couple of days later, it was their turn to help us down through the Lapworth flight on the North Stratford canal:

Helen navigating

Here you can see Helen navigating while Susan and I are closing the gates – Rob was, of course, taking the photo!

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Feeling Small

• Moving

Narrowboats are, as I have mentioned before, really designed for narrow canals. At the moment, however, we are on the South Yorkshire Navigation. Navigations are strange things. They are a mixture of big, wide canals and rivers. Often you don’t know which of them you are on – rivers can be quite powerful streams, whereas the canal bits tend to be much quieter. On canals you can usually find places to moor as there will be a tow path alongside. On rivers it is a different story as the land either side is privately owned and will often be heavily wooded, overhanging the bank so that you cannot even see it.

In addition to this, although there is no longer much commercial traffic on these navigations, you can come across some, and it can be BIG. Yesterday, we were advised by CRT staff (Canal and River Trust) to moor up at the staging point (where you get off/on to operate the lock) below the lock we had just gone through as there was a big fuel barge coming up. They were right-

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Mods and Locks

• Challenges
• Fittings
• Interior
• Living aboard
• Moving
• On the move

While we were in the USA visiting Nick and his family, we left Brandy Pad in a marina at Stretford (Manchester).  When the boat was built, we had decided to keep the saloon “open plan”. Hire boats we have had in the past worked well with a table, 4 chairs and a couple of armchairs and we wanted to see if something similar would work for us. Having tried a couple of different combinations we eventually came to realise that the hire boats had been quite a bit longer and hence had more room in the saloon than we have. So, we decided to have a dinette built in. This should give us a more appropriate sitting/dining area and also double up as a spare bed for visitors. Stretford Marine were due to do the work while we were away, but Mal, the carpenter, was delayed on another project and wasn’t able to start until we came back.  Just as well really as we had to make quite a lot of decisions on the design as it was being built.  This was the saloon before:

Empty space (the folding table we had been using is on the bottom left)

The dinette is now completed successfully and we are very happy with the end result as it is proving more practical (and comfortable) than the previous arrangement:

Yesterday (Thursday) we tackled the Wigan flight of locks.  This is a rise of just under 215 feet over 21 challenging locks. Due to water shortages in the pounds between the locks, boats are only allowed into or out of the flight between 8-9am and 2-3pm.  So, we were up early and ready to get going at 8am.  We were first in the queue, having moved up to wait there the night before, and “buddied” up with Jeremy and Mary on nb Angelica. This meant we went up through all the locks together as the locks are wide enough for two narrowboats at once.  This saves water and shares the work.  In fact, we roped together at the bottom and stayed that way to the top.  We have not used this particular technique before, but it means that one boat does most of the driving and steering calling for assistance from the second boat when necessary. The water level was so low in one of the pounds between locks that Brandy Pad ran aground, so I had to call for Helen to run some more water through the next lock into our pound to float us off.

We completed the whole climb in around 5 hours and slept very well last night 😉

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