June Cruise - Day Seven

We had our first cooked breakfast of the trip today, then set off at 8.15.  It was just a short distance to Pershore Lock, which is relatively deep at 9ft.  It was against us so needed filling -- there's a ground paddle to use in addition to the gate paddles, and when you see the force of the water from the gate paddles you can understand why the signs say to use the ground paddle first.

There are two bridges at Pershore, one dating from the 14th century the other from 1928, reputed to be the first concrete bridge in Worcestershire.

The next lock is Nafford Lock, which has a very awkward dog-leg approach and a bridge across the chamber which needs to be swung out of the way first.

Eckington Bridge is very old, and many of the stones have worn away.

The final lock is Strensham Lock, then there's a sailing club where one sailor was making the most of the very strong wind, tacking back and forth across the river.  As the promised rain hadn't materialised, we considered changing our minds about not going down to Gloucester.  However, the wind was so strong (and cold) that we thought it unlikely that we'd enjoy the trip down the Severn, and there's the added complication of restricted lockings into Gloucester Docks because of low water levels.

By the time we reached Tewkesbury we were ready to stop for the day, even though it was only lunchtime.  We turned the boat around and moored just upstream of the lock, next to a small park.  The Avon Navigation Trust charges £3 a night.

After lunch we walked into town and went to a second hand book shop mentioned in the Pearson guide, where we bought a 1985 waterways map for £1, which might well work above the dinette.  We continued round the Abbey, and then headed out over the Severn Ham, a huge area of grassland between the Avon and the Severn, where we had a look at the Severn.  The views back to Tewkesbury are great, with lots of rooftops huddled around the Abbey.

The rain has now started, so we're glad we're inside and not on the Severn.

12 miles, 3 locks.  (89 miles, 100 locks)

June Cruise - Day Six

Last night's mooring at George Billington Lock was very quiet.  The area is very popular with fishermen, several of whom stayed overnight, mostly in tents although there was also one motorhome.  One even had a special little tent for an elaborate looking camping stove.

When Bruce and Sheila visited the other day, they diagnosed our troublesome macerator loo as being scaled up.  As we haven't been to a chandlery, we haven't been able to get their recommended LeeSan descaler.  But we did find something called Killrock-K at Robert Dyas in Stratford, so we thought we try it.  Before going to bed last night we put a whole bottle down the loo, making sure that plenty went into the macerator unit.  This morning, the loo is much more powerful, so we'll put that down as a success.

First thing this morning we moved across to the water point, and filled the tank while we had breakfast.  It was an exceptionally fast tap, so we were brim full in no time.  Then it was into the lock and off down the river.  The next lock was Evesham, which still has its distinctive lock keeper's house, even though it was badly damaged in the floods, and is due to be demolished.  If I remember correctly, the proposed repacement was deemed to be too ordinary and the planners demanded something better.

There's no lock keeper at Evesham any more, but a woman who lives on a boat there came and looked at our licence, and commented that we were the boat who'd had the wrong expiry date put on it.  Obviously the towpath telegraph is working well.  Evesham itself looked nice, with plenty of moorings along a park.

The next two locks, Chadbury and Fladbury both had mills alongside.  Fladbury was particularly pretty.  The channel below the lock is extremely narrow.

Along the next stretch we put the washing machine on for the first time, which involves using the TravelPack to provide enough electricity.  Fortunately, both worked well.  There are some very tight turns on the approach to Wyre Piddle (including a sharp sweep round Tiddle Widdle Island), before Wyre Lock.  This one is a very strange shape.

 We arrived at Pershore at lunchtime, and Adrian did a good turn in the channel so we could moor into the stream next to a playing field.  As we're a day ahead of schedule, we considered a run down to Gloucester, but there are spring tides at the moment which make the Severn tidal up to Upper Lode Lock, near Tewkesbury.  Adrian rang the lock keepers at Gloucester and Upper Lode to ask about timings, and they really don't work, so we'll have to leave that trip for another day.

Instead, we decided to stay where we were.  It's a nice spot (although the boat is being bombarded by juvenile conkers being blown off the horse chestnut tree next to us by the gusty wind), and the park has been busy with grandparents and grandchildren feeding the scores of ducks.  We walked into town to find an Asda just a few hundred yards away, and a high street full of independent shops, including two hardware stores and an ironmongers.  There are some very pretty houses, and the Abbey, which was closed today because the BBC was filming items for Songs of Praise.

Back at the boat, Adrian wired the loo tank warning light back up (it had been left after rewiring the loo a few weeks ago) which required another walk to the ironmongers, while I used another Bruce and Sheila recommendation, Shiny Sinks, to tackle our brass.  It's fantastic stuff, which shifts the grime really well.  You still need to use Brasso to get a proper shine, but the boat looks a lot better.  I've done the mushrooms, the pumpout and rinse points, fairleads, the tunnel light and horn.  The Houdini hatch I think will take several hours on its own, so that's for another day.

15 miles, 5 locks.  (77 miles, 97 locks)

June Cruise - Day Five

Last night we ate at the Dirty Duck (also known as the Black Swan) just beyond the theatre, where we sat on the front terrace with a river view.  They were offering two main courses for £9.95, and they were pretty good.  As we walked back, we watched lots of young kayakers training on the river, then sat in the cratch as the sun went down, and the almost full moon came up.

This morning, we needed to shop for food and a few other things, so walked the short distance into town.  In a couple of cases, we were waiting outside for the shops to open!  Once that was done, we got the anchor out of the locker, then I went to set the lock down to the river, while Adrian left our pontoon and went into the wide part of the basin to turn around.  When we'd just gone into the lock, a member of Avon Navigation Trust staff pointed out that our Avon licence appeared to have expired on 3 June.  As we'd bought it yesterday (and the start date was given as today) this was clearly wrong so I went back to the floating office and he tipexed out the old date, and put the correct one in.

From being fairly quiet, the bridge over the lock was suddenly thronging with people, including a Stratford walking tour group whose guide asked for permission to watch us work through the lock!  Once we'd reached the river level, Adrian took Briar Rose out of the lock past the theatre while I walked across Tramway Bridge down to the first lock.  At the same time we had an unforecast shower of rain.

The rules of the Avon say that fore and aft ropes have to be used in the locks, and both gates left open on exit.  However, as we're going downstream and the locks are very gentle, we've found that a centre line is fine; upsteam it's a different matter, as I discovered when I had to refill a lock later in the day.  Also, it seems to be common practice to leave just one gate open if you're locking alone.

 Many of the locks have narrow angled entry chanels, and there's often a pull from the accompanying weir.  Most also have overnight moorings above the lock.  They're quite hard work, as the gates are big, heavy, and a job to get moving, and while the mechanisms for lifting and lowering the paddles are smooth, they also require almost forty turns.  We stopped for lunch on the mooring at Pilgrim Lock, which appears to in the middle of nowhere, and where we heard a cuckoo.

After lunch, we continued through Bidford, making sure we used the correct arch of the bridge (which is well signed, so you'd really have to be in a world of your own to take the wrong arch, even if the middle one is the biggest).

The river is sometimes narrow and winding, sometimes wide and deep.  Briar Rose seemed to love the experience, and as we passed Cleve Hill, with the right bank in Warwickshire and the left bank in Worcestershire, the sun came out.

 We'd passed very few boats all day, but two arrived as we left Robert Aickman New Lock.  We decided to moor for the night above the next lock, George Billington Lock, as black clouds were rolling in.  In fact, we've had only one short shower, and the sun has made a couple of appearances.  Four boats have come up the lock while we've been here, including a wooden one, a plastic one, and a widebeam.

Finally, a note about the ANT's guide to the Avon, which we bought for £6.50 from the floating office at the basin.  In some ways it's very good, with detailed maps of the locks showing where the moorings and landing stages are, as well as where the weirs go.  But the format is a summary page for each section of river, followed by detailed maps of each lock.  That's fine if you're travelling from Tewkesbury to Stratford; going the other way, it proves to be very confusing.  Also, all the locks are named after benefactors to the restoration of the navigation.  Those names appear in the Pearson's guide, the Nicholsons, and on the signs at all the locks.  Yet the Avon guide insists on using the geographical names for the locks, only mentioning the current names in parenthesis, and then only on the detailed maps.

14 miles, 9 locks.  (62 miles, 92 locks)

June Cruise - Day Four

After yesterday's evening of drinking and eating with Bruce and Sheila from Sanity Again (and we know exactly how many bottles were consumed, as we'd been to the rubbish point that morning), I didn't sleep that well.  But we still managed to stay in bed longer than other mornings this trip.  Before we set off Sanity Again came past, and we also did a job that we've been meaning to do for a while: remove the dangling side fenders.  We don't see the need to have fenders deployed when travelling, in fact they are liable to cause more problems than they solve.  They were attached to fender eyes in the gunwales with shackles, some of which were badly rusted and needed a squirt of WD40 to get them moving.  We did the towpath side ones first, and the other side once we were in the lock.

It was a lovely morning -- sunny and warm, and the dappled sunshine through the trees made for a magical scene.  It really is a very beautiful canal, even if the locks feel like hard work and the bridges are very narrow and often strangely skewed across the canal.

We crossed a number of aqueducts, a tiny one at Yarningale, a bigger one high over the A3400 at Wooton Wawen (where we passed Sanity Again moored up), and a long one at Edstone.  Because the towpath is below the level of the water there's even more sense of flying that crossing the Ponty.

We got to Wilmcote at around 12 -- once again reaching our planned overnight stop at lunchtime.  We had lunch and decided to go down the flight of locks.  We were quite lucky with the number of boats coming up, so many of the locks were in our favour.  It's clearly the day for hire boats to be heading back.  They're very pretty locks, and it was really warm.

The moorings at the bottom of the locks are overshadowed by the rather noisy A46, so we made the decision to fill up with water at the water point, then press on to Stratford.  Many of the boats we'd passed said there was plenty of space at Bancroft Basin.  The journey was little more than an hour and a half, passing through the less touisty bits of the town.  On arrival in the basin I did (even though I do say so myself), a great spin to reverse onto one of the pontoons.  We have the statue of Shakespeare and Hamlet behind us.  We went for a walk, bought our Avon licence from the floating office in the basin, and went up the new tower at the theatre, for great views of the town and the surrounding area (although there's a tree in the way of the basin).  As we're in a town, we may go out to eat tonight.

11 miles, 24 locks.  (48 miles, 83 locks)

June Cruise - Day Three

We were awake early again, and set off at 7.30.  We passed several boats moored at the bottom of the Hatton Flight, but no-one rushed out to say they'd join us up the locks.  But we took our time with the bottom lock (which had to be turned in any case), and dumped rubbish at the bins there.  And just as we were leaving the lock a boat arrived below.  I lifted a paddle for them and we waited at the second lock.  It turned out to be Merlin, a Stoke boat on the way to the Russell Newbery rally at Stourbridge, with a lovely couple on board.  I'm not sure that teaming us with them saved us any time, but it certainly made the journey more pleasant.  They even made us tea, which we drank at a pause in a lock half way up.

Towards the top end of the flight we began to meet boats coming down, sometimes indiviually sometime in pairs.  We got to the top at 11am, by which time the sun had come out, and carried to to Kingswood Junction, where we moored before the turn and walked into the village for the shop.  We made it a circular walk by going up to canal and walking along the Lapworth Link.

We had lunch in the cratch, then set off again at about 2pm, turning onto the link, then left onto the Stratford Canal.  We were following a boat down, so had to turn all the locks, and memories of how slow they fill and empty, and how heavy the gates can be came flooding back.  However, it's a very pretty canal and worth the effort.  It's quite heavily locked, and I ended up walking all the way from Kingswood Junction to Lowsonford.

We knew Sanity Again was moored at Lowsonford (thanks to twitter), and arrived there just after 4.  Bruce and Sheila pointed out that we were a bit late for a mooring, as the last one had just been taken.  They suggested we go down one more lock and use a space on what are technically long term moorings (something they'd never do themselves, obviously!)  Bruce and Sheila walked down with us, and we chose a length which wasn't marked by a name plate.  Then they came on board for a guided tour and a drink, and ended us staying for dinner as well -- resulting in a very pleasant evening, all the better for being unplanned.  With Bruce and Sheila's experience with Sanity, built straight after Briar Rose, we learned a lot.  The time flew by, and it was 10pm before they made their way back to Sanity Again.

10 miles, 31 locks.  (38 miles, 59 locks)

June Cruise - Day Two

We knew a lot of rain was on its way today, so when we woke up early and it was lovely and sunny we decided to get up and go.  Consequently, we set off at 7am heading towards darker skies.  In fact, you could see the weather front advancing.

At Napton Junction we made the turn onto the Grand Union proper.  A boat was just going into the top lock at Calcutt, and with a bit of hooting of the horn and waving, they waited for us to join them.  As it happened, they were doing just the one lock as it was based at Calcutt and was returning to the wharf.  The pound below was a bit chaotic, as Calcutt were moving boats about.

Below the locks we'd spotted a Viking Afloat hire boat some way ahead, and hoped we could time it right to share the Stockton Locks.  As it happened, they'd moored up just above the locks and said they'd be there for a bit of a break, so we did the top lock alone.  But as we were leaving the lock they set off behind us, so we waited for them in the second lock.  They turned out to be excellent locking partners -- three generations of a family from the local area.  We cross with a boat in the next pound, but then had the flight to ourselves.  We were able to lock ahead, so I suggested that we do a bit of "synchronised boating", where the two boats leave the lock together, stay just inches apart across the pound, and go into the next lock together.  It always saves a lot of faffing about, and worked very well.

Consequently we flew down the locks.  It was raining, but not heavily, and a bit cold, so between Itchington Bottom Lock and the Bascote Locks I lit the fire.  The Bascote staircase pair is the only one of its kind on the Grand Union.

As we were making such rapid progress we all agreed to carry on, finally stopping for lunch below the bottom Fosse Lock at 1pm.  This was actually our planned overnight stop, but we decided that as we were doing so well time-wise, we'd do another couple of hours this afternoon.  We're not pushed for time on this trip, but we've done this section lots of times, and it's nice to have the flexibility to spend a bit more time on the parts of the trip that are new to us.

In hindsight, this was something of a mistake, as the rain this afternoon has been much heavier than this morning.  We finally moored up at 4.15 above the Cape Locks, both soaked in spite of our waterproofs.  Still, thanks to the fire we've warmed up, and there's a roast going in the oven.

16 miles, 25 locks.  (28 miles, 28 locks)

June Cruise - Day One

We left home before 7am, and arrived at Brinklow just after 9.  Unpacking was done quickly, then the car was parked and we were off at around 10 in lovely sunshine.

There didn't see to be that many boats about, but of course you always meet them at the worst places.  Just after Newbold tunnel is a funny little pound, on a bend, with moorings and a water point, and a bridge.  There was a boat just finishing up on the water point, and my bow was nearly level with his stern when I saw a boat coming through the bridge.  I had to reverse, the boat coming through the bridge had to stop, and it was all a bit messy.  The man on the water point bent down to release his ropes.  "Shall I get out of the way?" he asked.  "Sure," I replied, thinking that if he'd indicated to me that a boat was coming, I could have waited further back and everything would have been a lot easier.  Anyway, he set off in front of us, and had a better run up the locks at Hillmorton.  There were quite a few boats at the locks, but even so we had to turn the middle one.  We stopped at the top for a lunch break.

There seems to be much more progress on the Barby Moorings, with the entrance now built and the wharf side very visible.  On the approach to Braunston, I jumped off at a bridge hole and walked up to Wharf House to buy a pole, just in case we need one this trip.  I can't actually remember the last time we had to deploy the pole, but I suppose it's safer to have one available just in case.  On the way, we spotted Starcross moored up.  I walked back with the pole to the junction, where Adrian had moored up to wait.  Then we carried on to Bridge 102, our planned stop for the night.  As we came round the corner, we could see that the best moorings, beyond the bridge, were full, so we joined the end of a long row of boats, immediately in front of Jannock.  A little later, Doug and James from Chance came for dinner, our first guests on board.  We had a lovely evening, talking boats and all sorts of things.

I didn't take many photos today as we've done this section a couple of times since buying Briar Rose, and as it happens the internet signal here is too weak to upload them anyway.

12 miles, 3 locks.