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Weed on the Erewash


gbclive

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On 15/08/2020 at 09:22, gbclive said:

Thanks, that’s most interesting.

Of course the weed may have got much worse with all the sunshine there has been recently, but I suspect there were several other factors that probably contributed to the magnitude of my difficulties.

For instance:

▪️My particular hull and draught (63’ and about 32”).

▪️A relatively low powered vintage engine (22 HP when new in 1948)

▪️Low RPM (normal cruise 400 - 500 RPM with max achievable somewhat less than it’s 1000 limit.

▪️No reduction gearbox, so one to one gearing.

▪️Technique as mentioned by BEngo in post #2.

 

I almost regret the dramatic nature of my original post as I’d hate to think that it might have caused anyone unnecessary anxiety and perhaps caused them to change there plans. It will be interesting to hear how Captain Peg gets on.

In the mean time, can I ask how your boat differs from mine?

I must agree the clarity of the water was spectacular and the fish and flowering lily pads were very beautiful.

 

We have a 54ft Tyler Wilson shell pushed along by a 33hp beta 1305. It's driving a 17" egg whisk. 

The design build draft is 18" forward and 27" at the skeg. (and there probably lies the crux of the matter)

She's being dragged out for blacking next week so I shall have an opportunity to find out what the draught really is at that point.

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Just like to add we did enjoy our trip up the Erewash. My preconception was that it would be grim but we were glad that we were encouraged to give it a try.  Apart from a very localised stench that appears to come from a specialist recycling centre the trip was very pleasant.

 

A question I meant to ask but which slipped my mind. Why doesn't the lock numbering start at No 1? 

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For comparison Vulpes is 35’ with a Petter PH2W (15 bhp at 1800 rpm) with a 2:1 gearbox and a 19” x 13” prop. Draught is about 2’ 3”.

9 minutes ago, Cheshire cat said:

Just like to add we did enjoy our trip up the Erewash. My preconception was that it would be grim but we were glad that we were encouraged to give it a try.  Apart from a very localised stench that appears to come from a specialist recycling centre the trip was very pleasant.

 

A question I meant to ask but which slipped my mind. Why doesn't the lock numbering start at No 1? 

I assumed the numbering was from Norton Junction (GU Leicester line) but I’d have to check.

 

As urban canals go it’s excellent and of course it’s fairly rural toward the top end. I sometimes bemoan that urban canals are now too green since trees obscure seemingly everything. At least there are a couple of dark satanic mills at Long Eaton.
 

Imagine Buckby flight meets BCN northern reaches and you won’t be too far off.

 

JP

Edited by Captain Pegg
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Thanks @Captain Pegg and @Cheshire cat  for comparing notes etc.

For completeness, Dukes prop is now 20” x 13” (I’ve had the pitch reduced from 16” but its probably still a tad too much).

So looking for any obvious stand out differences that may be relevant: 

 

▪️Duke has the deepest draught by 6” or so (and is probably the heaviest).

▪️Duke has a conical clutch (and 1:1 reverser box) which becomes difficult or inoperable if anything jams between the stern gland and the prop.

▪️Otherwise it just leaves myself / technique as a factor??

 

The conical clutch was definitely a significant part of my problem, but so too was the weed rapping around the prop to the extent that propulsion was effectively lost.

 

I hope that between us we have provided enough of a picture to help others make their own judgement.

Glad you both had a much better experience than we did - any thoughts?

 

 

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Another vote for sprint and drift,  which got me unstuck in the Middle Level last week. 

 

I had some fun reversing up the forty foot to Horseway lock, but the blanket weed was a bit too much, even when just poling in reverse. The breadknife was very useful. 

 

https://scholargypsy.org.uk/2020/08/14/summer-trip-2-horseway-and-welches-dam/

DSC_0244.JPG.2e48db87a9e8f47d812779588c8d9674.JPG

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I don’t think sprint and drift is very applicable to the Erewash because it’s always weedy but the stuff that impedes you is in clumps sat on the bottom, which is never very far below below your prop. Hence you have no idea when to sprint and drift. You just accumulate stuff around the prop until you decide to clear it off. In my case I could do this by bursts of reverse.

 

However it’s one of those canals - like large parts of the BCN - where the prop wash will never appear to be right and can fool you into thinking it’s fouled when it’s just a combination of depth and debris upsetting the flow. If I hadn’t cruised the nether reaches of the BCN a lot in recent years I’d have been more bothered by it. Sometimes you just have to persevere and eventually the conditions improve. 

 

I do wonder if depth also played a part in @gbclive getting stuck as I thought the weed conditions improved above Dockholme lock. There are however some shallow sections particularly around bridges or narrows.

 

JP

Edited by Captain Pegg
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4 hours ago, Scholar Gypsy said:

Another vote for sprint and drift,  which got me unstuck in the Middle Level last week.

Thanks for that Simon.

I think that is sound advice, especially as  @BEngo who has a similar engine and clutch to Duke also recommended the technique.

Unfortunately, at least in this context, sprinting in not one of Dukes party pieces?

A combination of a heavy boat and a relatively small engine that is somewhat over-propped, results in low acceleration (and braking) rates compared to other boats I have experienced. Normally I really enjoy the challenge of managing the inertia, but in this case I believe it compounded the problem. I’m having difficulty in visualising how I could have achieved any significant sprint like speed as once we finally came to a standstill, both the prop and the shaft ahead of it fouled up massively and almost immediately in both forward and reverse, so we literally unable to move using the engine.

I don’t think I would have been brave enough to have repeatedly poled astern then rammed into the weed without some confidence that things would improve reasonably quickly.

Also, I must confess that on reflection, I think it’s possible that we were aground without realising it!?.

 

Incidentally, this is the Google maps ref. of the furthest we managed to get:

WP3F+8Q Long Eaton, Nottingham

 

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2 hours ago, Captain Pegg said:

However it’s one of those canals - like large parts of the BCN - where the prop wash will never appear to be right and can fool you into thinking it’s fouled when it’s just a combination of depth and debris upsetting the flow.

I can understand what you mean but having a deeper draught, I think we were hoovering up more weed than we could cope with. We really were stuck!

Quite how much this was down to the weed or perhaps also being aground, I will probably never know.

I shall file all this useful info away for the next time!?

Glad you made it all the way without any major dramas.

i think I will replan to visit another year, but somewhat earlier in the season before the hair algae has a chance to feed on sunlight for so long.
 

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29 minutes ago, gbclive said:

I can understand what you mean but having a deeper draught, I think we were hoovering up more weed than we could cope with. We really were stuck!

Quite how much this was down to the weed or perhaps also being aground, I will probably never know.

I shall file all this useful info away for the next time!?

Glad you made it all the way without any major dramas.

i think I will replan to visit another year, but somewhat earlier in the season before the hair algae has a chance to feed on sunlight for so long.
 

This is where we stuck on the bottom. That is the bottom visible in the picture with a large clump of the offending weed. I could see the contact between chine and bed of canal such is the clarity of the water.
 

The weed is mostly sitting on the bottom and doesn’t break the surface. It does so here because the water is so shallow. I guess your prop was flailing right through it.

 

Good news that you’re willing to give it another go. Be warned though there were a couple of locks with defective paddles that required more than a reasonable amount of force for one person to open the gates. Those were Stensons bottom gates and Shipley top gates. Hopefully they’ll be fixed. I’ll put a call into to CRT to register my findings.

 

JP

 

 

67E7AE9A-EF4E-4C09-9B5B-A8D01B455DC4.jpeg

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Thanks - all points added to my notes.

It’s amazing how soon a “never again” nightmare experience turns into perhaps a challenge to consider for the future?.

I think I would still take into account any feedback from deeper draught boats though.

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9 hours ago, Captain Pegg said:

This is where we stuck on the bottom. That is the bottom visible in the picture with a large clump of the offending weed. I could see the contact between chine and bed of canal such is the clarity of the water.
 

The weed is mostly sitting on the bottom and doesn’t break the surface. It does so here because the water is so shallow. I guess your prop was flailing right through it.

 

Good news that you’re willing to give it another go. Be warned though there were a couple of locks with defective paddles that required more than a reasonable amount of force for one person to open the gates. Those were Stensons bottom gates and Shipley top gates. Hopefully they’ll be fixed. I’ll put a call into to CRT to register my findings.

 

JP

 

 

67E7AE9A-EF4E-4C09-9B5B-A8D01B455DC4.jpeg

We always leave Shipley top gates as a matter of course, the wind will always keep them open.

2 minutes ago, gbclive said:

Thanks - all points added to my notes.

It’s amazing how soon a “never again” nightmare experience turns into perhaps a challenge to consider for the future?.

I think I would still take into account any feedback from deeper draught boats though.

mum and dads tug draws 3ft 3" and has been up and down since 1988. In fact, they have single handedly dredged the cut for 30 years!

Edited by stagedamager
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9 hours ago, Captain Pegg said:

 

 

Good news that you’re willing to give it another go. Be warned though there were a couple of locks with defective paddles that required more than a reasonable amount of force for one person to open the gates. Those were Stensons bottom gates and Shipley top gates. Hopefully they’ll be fixed. I’ll put a call into to CRT to register my findings.

 

JP

 

Were the volunteers not at Stenson, the one encounter with a volunteer when Mrs-M was more likely to shove the volunteer in the canal.

 

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2 minutes ago, Rob-M said:

Were the volunteers not at Stenson, the one encounter with a volunteer when Mrs-M was more likely to shove the volunteer in the canal.

 

I have had those feelings at stenson on more than one occasion, stensons is a different lock however,  halfway up the erewash.

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Just now, stagedamager said:

I have had those feelings at stenson on more than one occasion, stensons is a different lock however,  halfway up the erewash.

Just realised there was a Stensons on the Erewash as well as Stenson on the T&M.

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32 minutes ago, stagedamager said:

mum and dads tug draws 3ft 3" and has been up and down since 1988. In fact, they have single handedly dredged the cut for 30 years!

That’s good to know?.

What engine does it have?

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1 hour ago, Rob-M said:

Were the volunteers not at Stenson, the one encounter with a volunteer when Mrs-M was more likely to shove the volunteer in the canal.

 

 

1 hour ago, stagedamager said:

I have had those feelings at stenson on more than one occasion, stensons is a different lock however,  halfway up the erewash.

 

1 hour ago, Rob-M said:

Just realised there was a Stensons on the Erewash as well as Stenson on the T&M.

 

1 hour ago, stagedamager said:

We always leave Shipley top gates as a matter of course, the wind will always keep them open.

mum and dads tug draws 3ft 3" and has been up and down since 1988. In fact, they have single handedly dredged the cut for 30 years!

The locks at Fradley were all staffed on Friday but no one at Stenson on Saturday. That’s a beast of a lock. First time I’d ever been through there.

 

It did occur to me that I encountered Pastures lock empty and in leaving the top gates didn’t stay shut and this was the low pound. As Daniel made his way up the next pound at half a mile at hour while I ran some water down he had a local on the towpath for company. This guy said that they never catch the vandals in action. This put me in mind of Tardebigge where CRT staff bemoan boaters for leaving paddles open despite the fact you will happen upon empty pounds early in the morning when you know no one went through late on the previous day and you found no raised paddles. The same conditions apply, leaky bottom gates and top gates that don’t stay closed. Tardebigge is a bit remote for vandals so boaters get the blame but in Sandicare/Ilkeston it’s vandals that are an easy target. I’m not convinced.

 

Was I correct in my observation that not all the ground paddles are configured in the same way? Some culverts seemed to enter on the same side and some on the opposite. I had the gate paddles up quickly - you can with a short boat sat toward the back - so I didn’t always observe the ground paddles fully and there were a few that appeared to do nothing.
 

The nearside ground paddle at Shipley was one of those that seemed to do nothing and the lock took an age to fill. I thought we may need some mechanical advantage to open the gate but I was able to move it eventually but with an effort that couldn’t be repeated at every lock. I’d just struggled to get Stensons bottom open due to a defective bottom gate paddle and some top end leakage.
 

JP

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47 minutes ago, tom_c said:

The tug has a Ford BSD 332, 3 cylinder tractor engine

Thanks.

48 minutes ago, tom_c said:

The weed can be a bit of a pain, I had to run my Kelvin on all 4 cylinders to chop it up a bit.

So perhaps a little sympathy for my little J2??

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I think we must have suffered less because we were a couple of weeks earlier and a little less deep in the water. I did have to engage reverse a couple of times and I did look at my wake curiously several times

 

No doubt we were helped by there being plenty of water in the canal. I think it was at the third lock down it was over flowing the top gates as we raised the paddles on the lower gates resulting in a flooded towpath. I mentioned it to a maintenance guy who we met trying to find a sticky gate someone had reported.

 

"Music to my ears" he said. "Most of the time I'm up here it's because the kids have emptied a pound". 

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3 minutes ago, Cheshire cat said:

I think we must have suffered less because we were a couple of weeks earlier and a little less deep in the water. I did have to engage reverse a couple of times and I did look at my wake curiously several times

 

No doubt we were helped by there being plenty of water in the canal. I think it was at the third lock down it was over flowing the top gates as we raised the paddles on the lower gates resulting in a flooded towpath. I mentioned it to a maintenance guy who we met trying to find a sticky gate someone had reported.

 

"Music to my ears" he said. "Most of the time I'm up here it's because the kids have emptied a pound". 

Assuming it does suffer vandalism it would be helped if the approach to anti-vandal locks wasn’t so erratic and they were all functioning. There are a number of locks that have anti-vandal equipment on some but not all top paddles and it’s not even uniform between the ground and gate paddles. 

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47 minutes ago, reveriecanaltradingco said:

Our "little" J2 happily drags our pair of boats up and down the Erewash with little drama... just keep the boat hook handy and rake the blade if it gets to much ;) 

Thanks for that!?

I’m having a hard time recognising what sounds like an occasional casual intervention with a boat hook.

Each time I had to dive down the weed-hatch, it required quite a few minutes of winding the prop around whilst gradually loosening and unwinding long strands of tightly packed weed algae from around the shaft between the stern gland and the prop. as well as from the prop itself.

I must have been in some sort of parallel universe?

 

 

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3 minutes ago, gbclive said:

Thanks for that!?

I’m having a hard time recognising what sounds like an occasional casual intervention with a boat hook.

Each time I had to dive down the weed-hatch, it required quite a few minutes of winding the prop around whilst gradually loosening and unwinding long strands of tightly packed weed algae from around the shaft between the stern gland and the prop. as well as from the prop itself.

I must have been in some sort of parallel universe?

 

 

I found a bread knife very handy for this - make one cut at right angles to the prop,, and then (if the gap between prop and stern tube is big enough) saw along the prop shaft forwards and then reverse. Rotate 120 degrees and repeat twice.  See photo on post 30 above. 

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16 minutes ago, gbclive said:

Thanks for that!?

I’m having a hard time recognising what sounds like an occasional casual intervention with a boat hook.

Each time I had to dive down the weed-hatch, it required quite a few minutes of winding the prop around whilst gradually loosening and unwinding long strands of tightly packed weed algae from around the shaft between the stern gland and the prop. as well as from the prop itself.

I must have been in some sort of parallel universe?

 

 

If you don’t have a weed hatch those interventions are not necessarily casual, but I think many boaters seem to rely on the hatch ahead of prevention and simple methods of clearing the prop.

 

JP

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