We just moored up the other night in the dark, North of Nantwich just before the Llangollen Junction. Not in a sign posted mooring site ... thus we met the shelf!
Did a night with nothing special and we didn’t sink, did some reading as Storm Francis came in. (40+ mph gusts.)
The shelf is pretty obvious when you moor in the area (off of the marked mooring areas) as an underwater ledge that prevents you mooring snug against the towpath side. It bangs and grates your boat with the wind and wakes. Apparently the actual canal is shallow on the towpath side in these parts anyway, we have apretty standard liverpool boat draught..
In RECAP of the previous posts found here, the other entry I found on canalworld about the shelf and a quick fix we found worked, read on:
- Most folks, get prepped pre-Shropshire canal visit and get wheelbarrow wheels or go-kart wheels, hung from the boat, like fenders, but floating on the surface sideways, allowing the boat to clear the sill and bump against the nice soft rubber of the wheels instead.
- Some folks don't do anything about the shelf, moor up and weather the knocking sound in the night. I've seen a bunch of boats that haven't done anything special.
- I read an entry where on describing taking boats out and looking at the hull post shelf times and they noted it can damage the boat, at the least the blacking, worst it'll take a go at the metal. Which makes sense to me given your boats side is resting against largely old, uneven concrete mass, with the repetitive wind or wakes washing you up against it. Hence the horrible sounds. Also someone said they were unlucky and the shelf damaged their propeller.
Given this we erred on the side of caution - especially with the storm, so we went for a QUICK FIX:
See the pictures, but what we've gone for is taking some pieces of wood, little planks essentially, the slats from a single bed and wedging them into the bottom of the canal between the boat and the ledge.
We used 3x for the bow, stern and middle, where you keep the fenders and pushed them into the canal bottom by hand then with sledge hammer to fix them at a 45 ish degree angle and then pulled the boat onto them, instead of the ledge.
The idea came from someone recommending using their poles to do this, ours were too big or a bad fit. Essentially you could use any wood or similar thing to wedge between you and the ledge. Old fence posts, windblow branches, sheets of wood etc..
IT WORKED ! I suspect this won’t work everywhere but it did manage to stop us banging, clanging and scraping even with the storm. Best of luck.