On Thursday morning I’d
resigned myself to staying at Hopwood for the next couple of days whilst the
ice melted.
When I took Buddy for his
first walk, I checked the water point (that had burst on Tuesday) and it was
completely off. At least CRT had stopped
the leak but there was no indication of how long it would be out of action. The channel that Steve had made in the ice when
he left for Birmingham yesterday hadn’t frozen over so whilst having my coffee
I rang Lyons boatyard on the Stratford canal to ask about the ice situation
there. They told me it was all clear so,
coupled with the fact that there was no water at the water point I decided to
set off just before 10 o’clock.
All was clear on the
Worcester & Birmingham canal and as I approached the 1 ½ mile long Wast
Hills tunnel, for the fourth time in as many weeks, there was hardly any ice.
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Approaching Wast Hills
tunnel
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As you may well know, I’m
a bit bah humbug about Christmas and could quite happily ignore it. Karen, though, does like to put up lights and
a few baubles. At least the lights are
LED and battery powered so are not a drain on our boat batteries. I have to leave myself a note every day to
make sure I turn the lights on just before Karen gets home 😉 She has also rigged up lights on our outside
Christmas tree so, just to prove I do have them on, here’s a picture taken when
going through the tunnel.
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Once we were out of the tunnel
I knew we were back in the outskirts of Birmingham as the bridges have the red
doors in them. If you’ve followed the
blog for a while, you’ll be bored of hearing about them, but for new readers,
they were installed during the last war to enable firefighters to have easy
access to water.
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About ½ mile after leaving
the tunnel we arrived at Kings Norton junction where we turned right onto the Stratford
canal.
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Turning right onto the Stratford
canal
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It wasn’t long before I
realised that only a few boats had been along here over the last few days. The ice was still quite thick in places but,
strangely, in others it had completely disappeared. Just short of Brandwood tunnel I stopped and
moored up as the going was getting so difficult. It’s amazing how breaking ice can make a boat
swerve off direction quite alarmingly. Apart
from potentially damaging the blacking, I kept getting moved onto one side or
the other, often ending up on a silt bank.
That meant I had to reverse off and then try and carve a different
channel.
After mooring up I had a
look around the local estate for places for Karen could park the car after
work. It wasn’t a particularly nice estate
and I was half inclined to cancel Sue who was due to come up on Friday.
I got back to the boat,
had lunch and then rang the boatyard again.
They assured me that it was only a hundred yards or so and the ice disappears,
so I got togged up again and carried on.
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| Approaching Brandwood tunnel just after lunch |
I finally made it to the
boatyard and filled up with diesel and water.
I also got rid of the rubbish and recycling that had been building up
for the last couple of weeks. I had a
good chat with Sarah who served me and realised we sort of knew each other as
we had seen each other around before. She
and her husband live on their boat, Stealth, and work four days a week,
spending the other three cruising the system.
All was clear for a while
after leaving the yard, and the ice was relatively thin, but about ¼ mile before
where I wanted to moor at Shirley liftbridge, it started getting thick
again. This time I had to keep reversing
to give myself clear water to enable me to have power to cut a channel through
the ice. I arrived at the aqueduct just
before where I wanted to moor and was completely stopped. As I had done several times already during
the journey I got the bargepole and went ahead breaking the ice.
A couple were out walking
their dog and they stopped to watch my shenanigans but at least they were also
giving me active encouragement. They
were saying things like, ‘you can make it’ and ‘go on really rev that engine’. I got moored up in the end and couldn’t
believe it had taken six hours to cover seven miles, and that was without any
locks ☹
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Last of the sun at our
mooring for Thursday night
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