36 locks in two days

14th & 15th April

Yesterday was a prompt start, though not as prompt as today. We locked steadily up the 11 locks of the Curdworth flight, Sheila lockwheeling initially. This gave her the chance to look for a couple of the caches we'd missed yesterday.

The first of these, near the pub, was still nowhere to be seen, but the second was found behind its tree. Half way up was the site of the cache that's been muggled. As I slotted Sanity into the lock, Sheila called down that she thought she'd seen the container from the cache floating in the lock.

When Sanity had reached the top, sure enough, there was the battered remains of the cache container, still with its green geocaching sticker on it. I popped it back where it should have been, and later posted a note to that effect on its webpage, so that its owner can recover it if he wants to see if he can reuse it.

A case of 3M, I fear: Mindless Malicious Muggling.

We had soon realised that we were following another boat up the flight, and could see them leaving the lock above on several occasions. I took over lockwheeling for the second half of the flight, and at the top waited for a boat to lock down before letting Sheila in. To my surprise, it was the boat we'd been following. They'd winded as soon as leaving the top lock, and now were on their way down again.

Apparently they'd decided to do 22 locks just for the sake of it.

There was no one in the rather gloomy cutting at Curdworth, so we pressed on to Wiggins Hill just beyond. There was no one there, either, but it's the last place we like to overnight in before getting into the BCN proper.

We had a pleasant afternoon in mixed weather. I did a Building Sanity Again post on engines, and then we sat down together and went through the Sanity Again specification and quote. By the time we'd finished, we had a set of corrections to email to Peter for his further comments and pricing.

Sheila then had a happy time hunting down more ebooks, downloading them into calibre and transferring some to her reader.

As the afternoon drew to a close, some other boats arrived and tied nearby; we're not the only ones who use this mooring as a jumping off point for Birmingham, clearly. Wanting a seriously early start, we went to bed just after nine, with the alarm set for 5.45.

This meant that we were boating by six. Sheila started whilst I ate breakfast, then I was able to relieve her before we got to the first of the Minworth locks. Initially it was a greyish but pleasant morning. The cut began to be populated with mysterious floating objects, and at Forge Lane Bridge we ran up and over some mysterious sunken objects with much grinding and clattering.

Once clear of the Minworth locks, I went below again to brush my teeth and make a coffee. The sky grew steadily darker, and flashes of lightning and rumbles of thunder grew closer and closer. Waterproof trousers were hastily donned, just in time.

As we approached Salford Junction, the one underneath Spaghetti Junction, rain began to deluge down, shortly joined by hail. The lightning struck the structures of the huge electricity substation, not once but several times, so the whole thing was very dramatic.

It had all settled down by the time we reached the bottom of the Perry Barr flight. There are 13 of these, and we were surprised to see Scarweather tied just above the bottom lock. That's a very short pound, and despite the anti vandal devices, the local kids quite often manage to drain it overnight. Still, they seemed to have survived.

Half way up we encountered the BW lockies checking the flight. There had been a youth group on a boat down it the day before, and their locking technique had left a lot to be desired. The lockies were busy closing gates and paddles and resetting the antivandal locks.

No serious damage seemed to have been done, though one or two of the pounds were quite low. From the top it's a plod along a very straight canal to Rushall Junction. This proved a hard turn to make, as there really wasn't a lot of depth, and Sanity just didn't want to go up there.

We got round with the aid of the long shaft, and headed towards the last flight of the day. By now it was a case of just keeping at it. At the top, a nice guy from another boat helped us up the last two, and we were able to tie on the visitor moorings at Longwood Junction by half one, having done 25 locks between 6 am and 1.30 pm.

It's been a quiet afternoon.

Tomorrow we'll go more gently along to Anglesey Basin, stopping to shop at Aldridge on the way.