Between Rugby and Brinklow to 1 Mile past Hopwas
34 Miles 14 Locks.
Tuesday. Got going early (for us) this morning, past Rose Narrowboats at Stretton Stop where boaters have to rotate a very light pedestrian swing bridge, take the boat through and then close it, nice steady cruise along the last bit of the North Oxford canal to Hawksbury Junction where the Oxford joins the Coventry Canal, there's a lock here with a very small drop of 6 inches, put there when Canals were owned by different private companies who feared that another company might steal their water, after the lock we had to negotiate a 180 degree turn to the right, if you go left the Canal leads into Coventry.
Charity Dock at Bedworth, always plenty to look at.
Bedworth and Nuneaton is Allotments Land.
Onboard Energy fitted all the electrics to No Direction and the Battery monitor panel needed a little adjustment so as we were passing it was a good opportunity to get it sorted, we moored outside and waited for Kevin, their top electrical man to finish another job, he arrived and reset our monitor panel in a matter of minutes, he was rewarded with his very own No Direction Mug.
Only very nice people get these.
We then moved across to the towpath side of the Canal and that's where we stayed for the night.
You get a very good view of Mount Jud from here, a large pimple shaped Spoil Heap left over from the huge Judkins Quarry, it even has it's own facebook page.
Wednesday. We had a lonely run to the first of the 11 Atherstone locks with no other boats moving.
We past the British Waterways yard at Hartshill on the Coventry Canal (The clocks wrong)
As we arrived at the top lock a boat was about to exit so we went straight in, it was the same at the third one as well, after all the Broad locks we have done this trip, these narrow ones are like toys. The first 5 locks going down are close together, after the 5th one we tied up and had breakfast, and then tackled the final 6 and had a nice afternoon, although it was cool the sun was out and no wind, we had to wait at the 2 Glascote locks as 1 of the top paddles was not working which made the lock slow to fill, once clear of the last lock Jayne went inside for a well earned rest.
At bridge 75 we experienced the only bit of anti-social behaviour of the trip when a hooded youth threw a couple of handfuls of gravel at us, I had seen him (it) lurking on the bridge as we approached (obviously formulating his master plan) and slowed the boat right down, he ran off as I was offering an opinion of his life and pointing a camera at him.
We carried on through Fazeley junction, past the British Waterway Midlands head office at Peel Wharf, considering there is a Waterways office here there seems to be a higher that average number of un-licenced boats around.
We moored for the night halfway between Hopwas and Whittington.
No comments:
Post a Comment