alafloat

Maryanne with all the work infront of her





Old Broken Wing





This is out of date it was wrote when we were in Birmingham but now we are just outside Nantwich I will do a catch up tonight (hopefully)

Warwick to Birmingham

Right we are back in Birmingham
Maryanne arrived on Friday in fact I just realised that she has become our “Girl Friday”
We pulled out of our of our long stay mooring in Warwick with some sorrow for we had made some nice friends there who either walk their dog or kids to school, and our now friends over at Kate Boats, But onward now to Birmingham this is a journey of 30 miles and 51 locks which in canal language is 30+51=81 81over 3= 27 hrs we did it in 20 knocking of 7hrs not bad and I did not break the speed limit (the canal is so shallow you couldn’t)
I want to sing my praise to our, when starting out novice crew yet on completion experienced crew Maryanne she has been promoted to first mate. It was a long and grueling trek, yesterday was the better of the two days as we went through some very nice country and the Hatton flight of 23 locks are very very nice. We also joined up with another boat crewed by a girl about Maryanne’s age which made the flight a lot easier than doing it by yourself. Noreen insisted on doing her bit and managed to give instruction and swing open the lock gates, these need a certain knack of balancing weight against water a knack learnt from swinging hundreds of gates.
We stayed last night at a place called Catherine-de-Barnes this sits on the outskirts of Solihull, which to us is on the outskirts of no return. I remember going through here on the way out it is definitely hostile country or as we use to say in Ireland Bandit country.
To that end I decided to get a very early start and as the first locks were 2 hours away I set off at 06.30 leaving the rest of the crew a few hours extra kip, like all generals I was very pleased that my battle plan worked and caught all the little scrotes sleeping Saturday off and we had a clear run. Though I do despair BW (with the help of my license fee) have made an excellent job of providing the inhabitants of Solihull a though fare of green natural history full of fauna and flora for all to enjoy. Yet the inhabitants of this fare town seem to have lost the idea of this beauty that has been bestowed upon them, it has become a place to let you Dog Sh—anywhere it wants, a place to discard that old arm chair or loose leave table, mattresses and why take cans, bottles, oil drums, chip trays, and plastic bags home when the good old BW has provided you with such a huge depository for them. It is a pity we missed the Solihull festival of throwing the Christmas tree in the cut Oh what a colourful occasion that must be. I thank the inhabitants of this crappy place for making me stop three times to clear the Prop of bloody rubbish. Oh if you have recently lost a cat, dog, chicken, favorite parrot you will no doubt find it floating upside down in the grand union canal Solihull. Though saying all that this state of affairs is only aprox 3 miles out of the thirty traveled.
Yet here we are only 15 miles away from that pit called Solihull in the centre of Birmingham that is clean, save and very lively. Two worlds apart
The last set of locks coming into Birmingham had been painted overnight, which meant you could not get anywhere near them without getting covered in paint, the quote of the day was the lock keeper saying to Maryanne “do you always have wet paint on your trousers or is that off the locks” Next move is to make Wolverhamton on our own single handed I only have three locks but this will give us three days of Danny and Rach and that should then get us through to Nantwich which will be great.