I arrived back from my final night shift of the set at about 9am. Adrian had already walked into town and done a big shop, and was waiting for me at the station so we could carry a bag each back to the boat. Once we'd sorted ourselves out we moved across the the water point by the top lock to fill the tank, start a wash load, and get rid of rubbish. The moorings we'd been on are technically 48 hours, but there are no signs to that effect anywhere; we'd been there three days, and some of the boats that were there when we arrived were still there when we left.
It was about 10am when the tank was full and we started down the lock flight. It's a very pretty flight, and we usually seem to do it in dappled sunshine. We quickly caught up with a single hander, but he moored in the long pound after the first five locks to do some shopping. After that we began meeting boats coming up.
It took about two and a quarter hours to do the eleven locks. The next section of canal is really quite pretty, and there were fields and fields of round straw bales.
We had lunch on the move, and passed through Polesworth, Alvecote, and Amington, where all the back gardens reach down to the canal. This was the most decorated.
At the two Glascote Locks a boat was going down, and then a CRT work boat was coming up. At the bottom, another boat arrived to go up, so we could leave the gates open for them. At Fazeley Junction we continued on the Coventry Canal (although this bit of the route was actually built by the Birmingham and Fazeley Canal company).
Just after the junction I spotted Lois Jane, and had a brief conversation with Debbie as we drifted past. Near Hopwas, Eleventh Heaven, was coming the other way and we had a similarly brief conversation with Chris. We moored up shortly afterwards on the outskirts of Hopwas, at about 4.30.
13 miles, 13 locks. (73 miles, 37 locks)
3 comments:
The chap who owns the highly decorated garden was sweeping his lawn when we came through a couple of months ago!
Pip NB Oleanna
You said "The moorings we'd been on are technically 48 hours, but there are no signs to that effect anywhere"
A bit puzzled by your explanation as the mooring times are whatever they are signed, or 14-day if no time limit is shown on signs. If you didn't see any time limit signs then they would be 14-day moorings, regardless of what any map might say.
As we passed while you were moored there we were checking my map data and did see 48-hour signs, albeit not very prominent so they were definitely 48-hour moorings. We check very carefully as some 48-hour moorings have recently been changed to 2-day moorings and we were looking to see if these had changed, but they hadn't.
Paul I knew you'd answer that bit! I would normally expect signs at each end of official moorings, and having walked from our boat to Coleshill Road Bridge multiple times, am pretty sure there's nothing that end. I didn't walk the other way to check. As we went down, I noticed the signs are missing in the long pound after Lock 5 -- presumably removed by people who wanted to stay longer.
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