A strong cross wind in Selly Oak

I took only two photos today, so I'd better share them. We walked the short distance from Cambrian Wharf into Birmingham's main shopping area looking - unsuccessfully - for trousers for me. After coffee back on board, I went back to sort out some business at a building society and returned to find Jan had got a fry-up under way. Yum! 

After this early lunch we battled the wind as we left the basin, turned and headed for the Worcester and Birmingham Canal. People on the bank seemed to be in a jolly mood: we got smiles and waves all the way today. 

At the Bournbrook Aqueduct at Selly Oak the wind blew strongly broadside; a couple of hundred yards further on, with Sainsbury's on our right and Selly Oak Station on our left, the wind was stronger still. Our chimney hat blew off; fortunately the safety wire attaching it held. Here we met up with Chris and Sally on Kairos and had a nice cup of tea and a chat on their boat.

In Sainsbury's my trousers quest was accomplished. Even better, we walked along the eastern end of the proposed new route of the Dudley (Lapal) Canal. We didn't have time to explore beyond Sainsbury's - perhaps next time we pass.

Around the Bournville area this man took a break from serenading his dog to talk to a towpath walker. The sun was in his eyes.

We made the sharp left turn onto the Stratford Canal and stopped at Bridge 5. This evening we had another fabulous curry at The Sweet Chillies in Yardley Wood Road.

Box on top keeps my tea hot

We had an uneventful journey from Birmingham to, er, Birmingham today (all right, it was from Cambrian Wharf in the city centre to Bridge 5 on the Stratford Canal at Yardley Wood) so I'll write about something else.

Two years ago I found some bits of scrap MDF by the bins at the bottom of the Napton Locks.  Using panel pins and PVA I knocked up a rough and ready box to take useful things and keep them out of the rain.  It sits on the cabin slide and works a treat.
 

In the box are the device on which I display Waterway Routes; a clock; a pair of clip-on sunglasses. There is space for a mug: the wind protection helps to keep my tea/coffee hot. Despite the MDF sitting on a sometimes wet surface it has lasted remarkably well.

As we approached Birmingham yesterday I saw a seagull walking along the towpath with a dead-looking gosling in its beak.
 

On the opposite towpath, having given up any fight, were Mr and Mrs Goose and one remaining gosling.

It seems a shame, but I suppose it's the way of the natural world.

Back to today ... and we enjoyed the second dry day in a row.  It was still cold, though - the stove is on as I write.  This was a peaceful part of the Worcester and Birmingham Canal.
 

From a distance the guillotine lock at King's Norton looked pleasingly free of graffiti.

Some became visible as we got closer, and the other side was sadly marred by the vandal's spray can.

So, as I say, we are at Bridge 5 (Yardley Wood Road).  We had a fabulous curry at our favourite Sweet Chillies restaurant.

Edgbaston Tunnel

I've been lugging stuff around the site here at Windmill End before the Black Country Boating Festival this weekend. There's quite a bit to do, but there's still time. I didn't take any photos today so here's one from yesterday: Edgbaston Tunnel.

It now has a wider towpath (or should I say cycle path?) extending over the canal, making it impossible for boats to pass. This isn't a problem as the tunnel is short, and most boaters would have waited anyway if an oncoming boat was already in.

A tunnel that wasn't, and one that was (although currently unnavigable)

It was good to see the toll house at King's Norton Junction being renovated after the fire a year or so ago.

On the Worcester and Birmingham Canal and heading into Birmingham there was a new building awaiting us. It looked as though it was built right over the canal with a tunnel for boats...

… but when we got there we found the building - part of the University of Birmingham and seemingly called Unite Students - was just to the west of the canal.

The only tunnel was that built to accommodate the proposed restoration (and re-routing) of the Dudley No. 2 Canal. This used to run from very near here at Selly Oak to Hawne Basin via the (now collapsed) Lapal Tunnel. If the restoration succeeds it is likely that the new canal will be known as the Lapal Canal.

The (short) tunnel is directly behind the slender tree in the photo above.

We stopped just round the corner from Holliday Wharf and walked to the Apple store. Here my phone was looked at but they couldn't do anything to make it work again. Grr. I discovered there that none of my contacts has been backed up in something called iCloud. Double grr. I am therefore now having to use my old Nokia PAYG, with no e-mail or WhatsApp. Even text messages cost money.

After lunch we continued our journey to Windmill End for the Black Country Boating Festival this weekend. At the toll island on the Birmingham Canal New Main Line, just before the Engine Arm Aqueduct, we found that it has been taken over by a nascent beech forest. It gave the side of the boat a good rubbing.

A little later, on a bridge high over the canal, a heron perched.

Who can identify the bridge for me?

We turned left at Dudley Port Junction and took about 35 minutes to get through Netherton Tunnel. The sign at the entrance suggests that passage should take approximately 56 minutes (sic). Really? Perhaps I misread the sign. We are now at the site of the BCBF and will get stuck in - helping with the setup - tomorrow.

Well-known canal junction cottage burnt out

We moored at Kings Norton Junction for two nights and moved on today to central Birmingham. It was sad to see that the cottage on the junction has suffered a devastating fire. The roof has gone and, I imagine, much of the interior. Fortunately it seems that the table of tolls on the first floor wall has been spared. I was told it happened a couple of months ago.

There's still no space in Brindleyplace ...

We tied up in Cambrian Wharf alongside the stone bank with its metal rail at water level. Bonglers were deployed.

The adjacent top lock of the Farmers Bridge flight had evidently just had the bottom gate replaced.

The rather flimsy-looking Portagantry was still in place, straddling the lock.

We went to the Wetherspoon in Broad Street for tea and walked back past Gas Street Basin.

On our way to the Black Country

Jan's using the laptop so this will be another post devoid of photos, sorry. After spending five days at a house we let in the Birmingham suburbs painting and cleaning ready for a new tenant, we have at last been boating again.

We left Yardley Wood at 1500 and arrived at central Brum at 1745. I dropped Jan off by the Mailbox so she could go to Tesco and I carried on to the services at Cambrian Wharf. There was space against the bank in the wharf so that's where we now are.

Tomorrow we'll probably make an early start as we head for Windmill End and the Black Country Boating Festival.

Fazeley to Yardley Wood in one day

It's the sort of cruising we might have done in our shared ownership days. We set off from Fazeley at 0630 and didn't stop until we reached Lyons Boatyard on the Stratford Canal, 23 miles and 38 locks later. We have a change of tenant at our house near here and wanted to check the place over. We are going to have to paint every room and organise replacing carpets. We'll be very busy for the next few days.

Again, apologies for the lack of photos. I don't think I've described our journey from Ilkeston. We did the first leg with son Andrew. He'd driven down from Sheffield; we did a car shuffle and boated to Shardlow. The next day we stopped at Barton Turn. Not the quietest of moorings, especially as there were night-time resurfacing works on the road bridge above us.

Leg 3 was Barton Turn to Fazeley. Having read Derwent6's blog we stopped at King's Orchard Marina for gas and diesel. Not far from there we encountered Del and Al in person. Del was hard at work on their battery problem but we chatted to Al for a while. Del did poke his head out of the engine room for an exchange of greetings.

And the last leg I have already summarised. We met Lisa and Dave on What a Lark near the top of the Curdworth flight - good to see you again.

Our next scheduled port of call will be the Black Country Boating Festival next weekend; we're hoping to be able to get there a day or so early in order to help set up, as in previous years. We'll see how we get on with jobs at the house.

Tewkesbury takes its toll

I'll start today's write-up with the photo which came out best. This is Abbey Mill from Severn Ham. Tewkesbury Abbey is in the background on the right.

Now back to the journey. It took a long time to get down the two locks from Diglis Basin onto the Severn. There were two hire boats and a narrowboat-style plastic cruiser in front of us. The hire boats were in the top lock and the cruiser had tied up to the lock landing leaving us hovering as there was nowhere else to go. The hire boats emptied the lock, but then found that the intermediate pound was too low, so they stayed in the lock and refilled it, then emptied it again before leaving. Meanwhile I had managed to get off the boat and walked down to the bottom lock to set it, which none of the numerous crew from the hire boats had thought of doing. Eventually we were able to enter the top lock and start down. These two locks take a very, very long time to empty and fill. They must be the slowest on the entire system - are they? Only one bottom paddle was working on the bottom lock, which didn't help.

In the top lock

The cruiser was also going to Tewkesbury, so we shared Diglis Lock with them.

leaving Diglis Lock

The Severn was placid, the weather was bright, dry and breezy, the scenery changed just sufficiently to prevent it getting too tedious.

typical Severn scene

We passed a couple of bulk loading sites with boats in situ.

It looked like gravel or sand was what was being transported.

After passing a mooring opportunity at Upton-on-Severn we made the left turn onto the River Avon and tied up beyond the lock entrance without going up the lock. Having paid the fee (the toll of the title) to the lockie we walked into Tewkesbury and marvelled at the abundance of old half-timbered buildings.

There are lots of narrow passages called 'courts' or 'alleys' - this one led to the old Baptist chapel of 1655.

We went to a service of Choral Evensong in the Abbey, then ate at the Bell (a very ordinary roast meal) (the beer was good though - North Cotswold 4.0%) before continuing our exploration of the town.

Here's another shot of Abbey Mill.

Tomorrow I shall cycle back to Worcester to get the car, then we have some decision making to do. I'd quite like to stay on in Tewkesbury for a sacred music festival in the Abbey, but that would interfere with our cruising plans. And do we continue to pay for mooring or do we carry on to Gloucester and drive back for the festival? Or do we get a two-week Avon licence or even a 30 day licence?

To be continued ...

Droitwich calling

We looked round the small museum in Droitwich this morning. I found the salt aspect of this disappointing - the Lion Salt Works museum on the Trent and Mersey Canal, with its large scale reconstruction of a working salt works, is much better.

But what Droitwich is really famous for - for me, anyway - is the BBC transmitting station which for many years radiated on 1500m long wave. (These days it's actually 1515m as the frequency was changed to 198kHz so that all AM broadcast transmissions were on frequencies a whole multiple of 9kHz (this happened in 1978, I believe)).

Down a corridor by the salty exhibits (mostly skulls and skeletons, by the way) is the more interesting part of the museum. An area dedicated to the old days of the BBC, when the BBC ran its own transmitters, studios and production. This being Droitwich, the exhibits were mainly connected with the transmitting station. On the left below is an early version of the main control desk.

There's an assortment of other paraphernalia, including an AXBT microphone (remember the tiller pin on Savoy Hill?)

This is an interesting former incarnation of the BBC logo. It looks like it's on a flower planter.

And here's some outside broadcast kit, the OBA 8 (outside broadcast amplifier 8). It's essentially a mixing desk for microphone inputs and was used inter alia to get regional stations set up as the second world war threatened.

All this equipment was obsolete by the time I joined the Corporation as an engineer in 1980 - but I do remember we had a Ferrograph tape deck in the videotape area. Not as old as this, probably.

Well, that's enough of that. We left Netherwich Basin at 1300 and continued down the Droitwich Barge Canal. This was bordered by vast reed banks for much of the way to the Severn, but a handful of locks added interest. Once on the Severn we passed through Bevere Lock and made our way downstream to Worcester, where we ascended the two locks into Diglis Basin and tied up on the canal just before the facilities. Photos tomorrow.

p'doyng, p'doyng, Droitwich!

We're on the move again. We spent ten days away from the boat seeing family and mowing the lawn etc. But now we have entered waters new: the Droitwich Canals.

How did we get here? From the Stratford Canal we had turned left at King's Norton Junction and overnighted at Hopwood on 12th July. The next day we went through Tardebigge Tunnel, made use of the facilities at the wharf and dropped down the top lock. We left the boat in this long pound while we were away. Returning on Tuesday 25th July we set off down the rest of the Tardebigge flight at about 1600 after I'd taken the car to Stoke Prior. When we saw a length of piling above Lock 33 we stopped for the night. En route we'd passed Gerty No. 30. We'd met Robert and Wendy at Etruria and in Milton Keynes, this time we did little more than exchange greetings as we passed between locks.

Yesterday we waited for the rain to stop before moving, then we finished off the Tardebigge Locks, then the Stoke Locks, then the Astwood Locks. We stopped at Hanbury Wharf, hoping for a cheap meal in the Eagle and Sun. This, we found, had gone upmarket so we saved our pennies and ate on board.

Today we set off just as it started to drizzle, and turned right into the Droitwich Junction Canal. This was the first time we have been able to do this - the last time we were here, on Shadow, the restoration had still to be completed.

This was our view of the first lock, one of three close together.

These have working side ponds, which I was looking forward to operating, but the locks were manned by a volunteer lockie who hardly gave me the chance to do anything. Next time I'll have to make sure we come "out of hours"!

These three locks are deep.

From memory, this bridge carries the access road to Droitwich Spa Marina. It's quite a tight squeeze, and to prevent any embarrassing scrapes it has floats tethered along the sides so you can't hit it.

The narrow locks are delightful, none more so than this two-rise staircase. We arrived at the same time as a boat coming up, who asked if they could use it first as the bottom lock was set for them. The crew seemed slightly concerned that I started filling the top lock, so I had to explain that it needed to be full in order to empty into the bottom lock to get them over the cill. Had the locks been wide we could have passed in the middle, as at Bascote or Bunbury.

Here is Jan taking Jubilee into the lower chamber.

Then came the low tunnel/culvert under the M5. We'd taken the can off the roof and lowered the pile of logs, and were relieved when we passed under the height gauge with perhaps three inches to spare.

The height gauge proved an accurate guide. I found it difficult to take a photo while crouching to steer - this is the best I could do.

The radio aerial was going "p'doyng, p'doyng" on the underside of the concrete sections, so too was my elbow once or twice. But then we were out, and soon at the Barge Lock marking the start of the Droitwich Barge Canal. We had already joined the River Salwarp, we shall be making its acquaintance again on the way to the Severn tomorrow.

After three manually operated swingbridges (BW key to release padlock) we tied up at 1300 to a pontoon at Netherwich Basin, Vines Park. After lunch we explored the town a little. There's more to see tomorrow: I'm looking forward to the display of BBC transmitter stuff in the museum.

Having one's knuckles rapped - by CRT

Oops! This evening I looked at my e-mails and discovered one from CRT headed "Please keep cruising if you've been moored for over 14 days". In it I was very politely told that my boat had been seen moored in the same general area for more than 14 days. The message included links to the relevant parts of the licence conditions. How could this have happened?  Well, we moored by Bridge 5 for two weeks, then moved to opposite Lyon's Boatyard for a further two weeks. This was while we were working on a house we let nearby. I had hoped that moving from Bridge 5 would be sufficient, but it appears that moving half a mile or so still counts as the "same general area".

our mooring opposite Lyon's Boatyard

Very few people stop at either location, and I had hoped that that might mean that the mooring police would not have bothered. But I'm impressed that we had been clocked.

When I read the e-mail we had already moved on - to Hopwood on the Worcester and Birmingham - but I wonder what the minimum moving distance might have been. The two miles to King's Norton Junction? Or less? Anyway, we have now finished the planned work at the house so we are cruising at last.  And I am very sorry to have been judged as overstaying.

Yesterday we were in Sheffield visiting Andrew. This electrical shop in Wicker caught my eye. It looks like just the sort of shop I would have loved as a small boy. I'd probably quite enjoy it now too.

The signs on the windows look as though they haven't changed from the 1980s, advertising 'video and cassette tapes', 'drive belts' and 'stylus', among other electrical essentials such as fire elements and urn spares. It's not all in the past, though. There's a website address above the shop.

Pressure washing the towpath

It's happened again. I was too tired last night to write the blog so here are two days' worth. We woke up on Wednesday morning to a fresh and sunny Cambrian Wharf.

We reversed out of the mooring, winded and headed for Worcester Bar where we joined the Worcester and Birmingham Canal. At Edgbaston we paused to chat to Peter on Solar Kingfisher. A little before King's Norton Junction we had to wait while a contractor's boat cleared a fallen tree from the canal and towpath.

We were eventually waved on past; as we did so I remarked that there was a nice load of logs for someone. Immediately I was offered some; this was my haul.

And this is the result of applying the bow saw later.

As we made the sharp left turn onto the Stratford Canal there was more work going on.

This time there was actually someone in the water, trimming off the tops of wooden stakes securing coir matting.

We tied up at Bridge 5 (Yardley Wood Road) where I did the log sawing. In the evening we went to our favourite curry house, the Sweet Chillies, for a lovely meal.

This morning I got a surprise as I looked out. Fog.

By the time we'd chatted to Dave who is renovating Canal Cottage, watered up and had a brief conversation with Brian and Diana on Harnser who came along the fog had gone to reveal sunshine.

Here is Harnser passing Canal Cottage.

One of the reasons we had reversed to the water point was to get out of the way of contractors pressure washing the brick towpath.

Our journey down the Stratford was uneventful until, just before the top lock of the Lapworth flight, a hire boat appeared in front. They were quite slow, and we had planned on having a barbecue in the long pound below Lock 5. To speed them up I cycled ahead and set the locks for them. Returning from setting Lock 5 I dinged my bell as I came up behind a man walking his dog along the towpath. This turned out to be our friend - and my former colleague - Ian. This unplanned meeting quickly turned into an invitation for him to join us for the barbecue, so we stopped above Lock 5 in the sun, lit the BBQ and had a really enjoyable evening. At one point Ian's friend Clive joined us for a drink. Clive used to be the chairman of the IWA. Ian gave us a top tip for a curry house in Warwick, so we'll go there on Saturday and check it out.

It was good to see you, Ian, and good to catch up on some BBC news.

Tomorrow's plan is to finish off the Lapworth Locks and get to the top of Hatton, leaving that flight for Saturday's little workout.