gatekrash

Or 'accidentally' burned down and demolished 2 days later ..

This morning 2023 Farmers bridge lock 6 Ashted lock 1 and ashted tunnel. Only minor damage to a fender hanger this time through ! Lots of water on the ashted flight... Street art murals near Curzon Street

Have they opened the extra bit yet? I'm sure when we went on it in May it was only a few weeks away from being opened.

Tonight, Gas Street basin in the rain. Quiet again in Brum today.

ISTR We had that problem last time we were that way,. We carry one of these on the boat connected to a bit of hose with a standard hozelok pushfit on the other end, it'll fit over the widest tap outlet.

That reminded me, our tank is due for emptying this year. We have 'Jeanette the Jet'. Last time we had it done a couple of years ago it was £140, looking at the invoice. Even if it's gone up it's still a hell of a lot cheaper than mains, given we don't pay the sewerage part of the water rates to South West Water.

We've got exactly the same model at home that @blackrose has got. It does some things really well, some stuff not so well. Mainly depends on how full the basket is, as others have said. We cook loads in ours, without issues as long as you don't overfill it and are sensible. It's also really good for keeping stuff warm without having to turn the fan oven on,...for example, this morning, the fried potatoes and mushrooms went into it to stay warm after being cooked whilst we cooked the black pud, bacon and eggs. We've used it for sausages, chops (although our butcher pork chops are way too big to fit 😁), chicken thighs work well, heating pies etc. Oven still goes on for anything bigger, like a full roast though. Haven't got one on the boat as we don't have space for it.

Congrats on booking with Cafwin, I know Catherine as we're in the same marina and she will go out of her way to make sure everything is spot on for your holiday. And both her boats are immaculate. I know you say you haven't any interest in Birmingham but I really wouldn't discount a night stop there, it's a real experience and is one of the biggest historical bits of the network. Others have said they'd suggest the Black Country ring, I'd agree with that route as a good option, depending on the river state you could either drop down the Droitwich canal or the W&B to Worcester which is a really nice city to visit, then up the Severn to the Staffs and Worc (which is a really lovely canal, I think), or if the river's high then you have the option of going up Tardebigge. The Severn locks are automated and run by lockies so not too difficult for new hirers. Plenty of historic places to visit on that route too, Hanbury Hall, Shugborough, Wightwick, Avoncroft museum. If you want a real slice of history then a day trip to the Black Country museum would be an option (make sure you get fish and chips there). In answer to your other question, we just share the locks. Sometimes I will do them, sometimes Mrs G does. If we're doing a flight like Tardebigge then one of us will lock the boat through whilst the other sets ahead and then comes back and closes up, then after a few locks we'll swap over again. If we're doing wide locks, such as down the Droitwich barge canal, then I'll do the locking as the gates are really heavy.

Well you probably picked one of the nicest, highest specced hire boats on the network ! Ollie is nearly new, and Catherine, who runs that boat, doesn't compromise on anything when it comes to making sure her guests are looked after. Thought I was going to see my boat for a minute but we were away up the Llangollen, so all I saw was an empty berth 😀

When we came through a few weeks ago the lockie at Holt said that they were only operating those times on rare occasions during the summer and generally they were covering the full shifts with staff as normal. Annoyingly we'd rushed through Stourport without stopping for lunch to make Holt before it closed and he said we needn't have bothered!!

Been there, done exactly that with ours. It bloody hurts. Also managed to trap the fleshy edge of my finger in the joint when I was taking the tiller off and it unfolded onto it, which caused a huge blood blister and also bloody hurt. However the Mrs loves the tiller so it's staying ! I just remember to check it's not folded up if I'm down the weed hatch.

We spent a couple of weeks up the Llan in May. So many places to stop. Wrenbury is nice, the little post office shop has a really good selection of supplies. Whitchurch is worth visiting, but it's a bit of a walk from the boat. Ellesmere, ignore the Tesco unless you really need lots of stuff and visit the deli instead, their pies are awesome. You can also stop by the lake which is an hour or so outside Ellesmere, which is really pretty. We also stopped at Chirk, although it was a Friday afternoon and the castle was shutting when we moored up. Definitely stop at Llangollen itself, the town is very nice too. If you're coming out of Beeston then the cheese at the Calvely Mill shop just after the services on the Shroppie one you've come up Bunbury is also worth a 10 minute stop for, if you like cheese that is !

Glad you said that. We've got a little 20 litre alpicool which we use as an occasional freezer and which we run off the mains if on shoreline or off the bow thruster battery if out and about, as we don't use the thruster so it doesn't matter if the battery goes flat. It has to live in the cratch cos the 'clunk' when it starts is really irritating! Good little freezer / small fridge though, great for the ice creams or ice for the rum and ginger beer 👍

When I started work as a mainframe programmer back in the 80s we used to get our assembler code dumps back on the 132 column paper. You'd get one line of code wrong, load a register incorrectly or something, and the first you knew you'd got an error was an hour later when a 9 inch thick box of paper turned up at your desk. Would take an hour to work through the stack of paper to find which line was wrong, you'd correct it, recompile and resubmit the job and then another hour later another 9 inch thick stack of paper would arrive, repeat every day for a week or so. The printers in the machine room were incredibly fast, given there were about 40 of us in the IT department and we were all generating vast amounts of printouts every day. Your estimate of a few minutes is right, it used to go through the thing almost at a blur. Once finished with I used to donate the stacks of paper to a local school to use the back for drawing on, but we must have used miles of paper in a week. We never had much time for the 'newbies' who started learning COBOL, they were never real programmers, cos they never experienced the 'pleasure' of working through the entire contents of a mainframe's memory written out line for line in EBCDIC (the forerunner of ASCII) and hexadecimal. At home I had one of those thermal printers attached to a ZX Spectrum. They were great as long as you only wanted a shiny black and silver printout which was about 4 inches wide.

We went through last month or so, some of the large stone blocks at the towpath edge under the bridge have dislodged and subsided. They aren't affecting the bridge at all, and I think, given the size of the blocks, that the stone is all still there. Looked to me like they just needed to build up the towpath edge and reseat the blocks, but whether they can do that without lowering the level I don't know.

We do ours fully, 3 coats of potable bitumen every 3 years, but we also patch it every year if we spot it starting to rust. But we have really good access to our tank so it's not a terrible job (especially as the Mrs is smaller than me and has to get into it 😁 ). Once you've done it you need to leave it for a couple of weeks to dry off then keep filling and flushing it for a couple of weeks as the water starts smelling of bitumen.

The results of this have now been published. Took a bit of finding... https://canalrivertrust.org.uk/enjoy-the-waterways/boating/boating-news-and-views/boating-blogs-and-features/customer-services-facilities-policy

The guy who was moored next to us (he was a local) said he regularly stays 3 nights on the 'normal' fingers, he just goes into the office and asks for an extra night and they didn't mind, as long as he paid. Possibly it was because it was earlier in the season and not busy. A few of the hire boats we saw come in, turn and leave again we overheard saying 'we can't stay here, this is the private end' or similar. But I suspect quite a few were put off by the reversing back onto the fingers.

Nor mine either. It stops about 5mm short of the swan neck fouling the suicide seats, so there's about a 60 degree tiller swing each direction. I've never investigated why, but clearly there are some sort of rudder lock stops fitted.

We've arrived back at Droitwich this morning. Total trip for us by the time we diverted down to Worcester for a day and back up the W&B was 305 miles, 262 locks. Interestingly when we planned it Canalplan (with our defaults tweaked to match our locking average speed) reckoned that it should have taken us 156.5 hours, our engine hours on arrival back show that the total trip took us 154 hours, so pretty accurate!

We've already decided to move before breakfast then stop for brunch somewhere instead. We're already thinking of the next long cruise, possibly the S Oxford as we've not been that way yet.

Well we decided on the S&W. Now wishing we hadn't as Wolverhampton boat club have decided to have their bank holiday cruise and there are about 20 boats from there sat on the Bratch top moorings, which presumably will all be wanting to go the same way as us tomorrow! Looks like an early start for us then !

I'll just leave this here...

We're half way down the Shroppie now, broke the back of Audlem yesterday (it was heaving there, the festival is this weekend and boats have been arriving for a week or so, all the 48hr moorings are full of traders, fortunately we weren't looking to stop until above lock 3!). Through Adderley and Tyrley today and stopped short of the Anchor due to a similar impending mutiny if we went on the extra half hour it would have taken to get there. Now trying to work out whether to go back via the BCN or the S&W. If we go via Brum we will look out for the challenge boats and undertake some heckling. Would have loved to have done it but we really weren't sure whether we'd have got back from the Llangollen in time, as it happens we would have had time to get down to Autherley just in time for the start. Never mind !

I reckon he's jumped ship whilst up the Llangollen...