On Saturday morning we walked into Solihull to dispose of
our recycling. Whilst we were locking up the boat a lady stopped with her dog
and said, “Hi, it’s Neil isn’t it? I
thought you would be moored here as I read your blog this morning”. Wendy is a member of the Facebook group, ‘Love
the Birmingham Canal Navigations, clean it and cruise it!!’. This group has been really helpful to us while
we were in the Birmingham area; answering our questions really promptly, e.g.
when we needed to know where moorings or services were in a certain area.
We cruised further down the Grand Union to Knowle passing
this distinctive coloured house.
Karen was upset to leave all these logs laying in their
graveyard but she managed to take some.
There are five locks in a flight at Knowle and they were
really difficult.
Not only were the
paddles hard to wind, it was very windy and exposed which made it hard to get from
one lock to another. We found the best
thing was for me to wait in a lock with the bottom gates open and wait for
Karen to open the top gates of the next lock.
Once she had opened them then I would need a lot of throttle to get across
the pound with the wind blowing the boat at almost 45 degrees.
The locks had winding gear that we hadn’t come across
before. They also wound down hydraulically
like the locks on the Thames.
We moored up in the Black Boy area and stayed in to watch
the rugby.
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