Bendy Lapworth

Another day, another lorra locks. We made another early start, getting away at ten past seven. I walked to the first lift bridge which opened readily – they are bascule bridges with hydraulic drive worked by a windlass, similar to the ones on the Upper Peak Forest. The second bridge proved to be a problem, though. Turning the spindle vigorously opened it only a few inches. I paused for a bit, tried again and it opened a bit further.

Several iterations of this finally got the bridge deck raised enough to get the boat through, but it wasn't a comfortable situation. Reminder: must email CRT West Mids about it.

Soon we were at the top of Lapworth and the serious work began. These are narrow locks, of course, and quite easy to work, but almost all of them were against us.

We worked in blocks of six and progress was steady rather than spectacular. The challenge is more for the steerer than the lockwheeler, as even on the straight section of the "thick" there is a bit of a bend between the bottom of one lock and the top of the next and for once the geometry doesn't favour a 70 footer.

There's a longer pound just a few locks down and here we found Anna and Martin on Braidbar 140, One Day. We know them well from the Owners' Group and because they moor in Mercia. I was lockwheeling at the time and stopped for a bit of a chat. Sheila paused beside them to carry on the conversation whilst I got the lock ready.

It was good to catch up, have a good run to Stratford, folks!

On and on we went. An Anglo-Welsh full of novices turned one lock in front of us, one of the few which had been mostly full, and there were towpath walkers and gongoozlers aplenty. We reached Kingswood Junction by half eleven and we've tied on the visitor moorings on the linking arm between the Stratford and the GU. It's very near the railway bridge carrying the Oxford - Birmingham line but the trains, though quite frequent, aren't very noisy.

Tomorrow, we've got around an hour's boating to the top of Hatton and then the slog down it. We'll stop at the top to fill the water tank and hopefully pick up a locking partner, the locks being broad like all of the GU mainline.

Location:Kingswood Jn

More good travelling

2nd & 3rd May

After a great night's sleep on Friday night (and no wonder) we had a great start to the boating day on Saturday. We chugged merrily along to the top of Knowle Locks, through blissfully rural canal, in warm Spring sunshine. Despite the claims of Carole Sampson in the First Mate Guide, we found no real mooring at the top of the locks, just some bollards for the lock landing and water point.

This was a bit of a blow, as we'd planned to get some bread and milk from the shops. We needed to water and to run the washing machine, but with the shops about 10 to 15 minutes walk away, it wasn't practical to visit them in the time taken to fill the water tank.

Having filled up we set off down the locks. I'd heard that they had a reputation for being heavy, despite the fact that the lock gear is the same as that on Hatton, which can be a bit hard, but by no means impossible. It may be that the Knowle flight is not so well maintained or something, but they were indeed hard work.

In addition, the design of the side ponds means that the lockwheeler has a long trek between each lock and the next. This led to me failing to get lock 3 open before letting Sheila on Sanity out of 2. It looked full, and indeed the top gates were swinging when I first saw them, but having emptied 2 into the pond between, I needed to lift a paddle to get the gate open again.

Whilst doing this, Sanity decided to do a little waltz in the wide pound, and finally jammed herself across it, sideways on to the gate. A serious bit of revving and hauling on the bow line eventually persuaded her into the lock, but after that, Sheila refused to leave one lock before the next was open.

The only other moment of note was much more fun: a rook came wandering round and perched on the balance beams as we locked down. Sheila saw it wait until the lock was almost empty, when it hopped down onto the cill and hoovered up the minnows trapped there.

Fish rescue the corvid way.

At Lapworth we tied just before the junction and I popped into the handy shop there, getting a loaf of bread, some pasties and some milk. We ate lunch straight away, then boated on to the top of Hatton. There's not much visitor mooring in the cutting, but some of the long term mooring was clearly not occupied, so we borrowed one of those for the night.

Elanor was able to join us for the evening, parking on the little bit of car park behind the Top Lock cafe. She brought us some decent meat from the Barton Turn butcher, so we had boned and rolled shoulder of lamb last night, with an onion and mint sauce, mashed spud and summer cabbage.

This morning I gave her a hair a clip (eight on top and six on the sides) and she went off at half nine to get a riding lesson. We had moved to the top of the flight at nine, but after waiting half an hour, there was no sign of another boat turning up to share down with us so off we went down the 21.

This turned into another good morning's boating. There were lots of gongoozlers about, of course, it being a Bank Holiday Sunday, but they were in cheerful mood, and gave us someone to chat to as we went down the 21.

As usual we alternated lockwheeling and steering in blocks of five. My right shoulder had informed me during the night that it was not best pleased with the work it had been expected to do down Knowle, so we got out the long throw windlass for Hatton.

This made a lot of difference, and I'm feeling the benefit now. We emerged from the bottom lock at 12.40, so three hours ten for the flight, not a record breaking time, but not bad for the two of us and one boat. We had a fair number of the locks with us, to be honest, there being steady traffic up the flight all morning.

We went straight on to the Cape, tying on the visitor mooring above the Cape Two. Shortly after we'd done so, Brian Jarrett came by on Kyle, and I was able to present him with two cans of used engine oil to fuel his Russell Newbery.

After lunch we went in search of a micro cache somewhere near Kate Boats, but couldn't find it, partly because the nettles were all over the likely site, partly because there were wandering muggles everywhere, and possibly because, as I realised when we got back to the boat, I'd not switched the Garmin back to the standard datum from the British OS one I was using in the Lakes.

Tomorrow we plan to take a day off from boating, staying on this mooring and going in to Warwick, then the day after we'll boat through Leamington Spa and tie at Radford Semele, ready to start the slog up the other side of the valley.