Fosse Locks to Braunston

March 7, 2010 by Mike · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Canals, Cruising Log 

Sunday 7th March 2010

Ropes frozen solid again

Ropes frozen solid again

Another cold start to the day. This time minus 9.5 and enough to freeze the canal yet again.   I certainly broke some miles of ice today!

Not much to say about the journey though, as it all went like clockwork.  I started very early and arrived at Long Itchington about 9am, just in time to see a mass exodus of boats, all heading the other way, until we caught up with two boats going up the Stockton locks ahead of us. 

At Calcutt the canal became so busy I had to think twice about whether this was March or mid Summer but under a deep blue sky and temperature barely into the plusses, Braunston was in sight by 4pm.

A lot of people seem to like it here

A lot of people seem to like it here

I spent the rest of the afternoon fixing things which had gone wrong yesterday.

I think I have a fair excuse for being tired tonight, after clocking up another 13 miles and 20 locks.  But another milestone in the journey, and here at Braunston 4 days before the canal reopens at the tunnel.

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Lapworth top to Lapworth bottom

February 22, 2010 by Mike · 1 Comment
Filed under: Canals, Cruising Log 

Sunday 21st February 2010

Zulu breaking the ice of new day at Lapworth

Zulu breaking the ice of new day at Lapworth

I looked out at 7am just in time to see the tail end of a snowstorm which had added at least another two inches of fresh snow overnight but at least this meant the temperature was on the rise after hitting minus 5.5 during the night.
 
I therefore got my lie-in and got up again after 9 when a lot of the fresh snow had already melted. At about 10am I optimistically set off into the ice, which although thawing, was still almost enough to stop us dead in our tracks.  In fact it did several times, but taking another run at it broke through.  Too late to think about the paintwork now though. Without the thaw in the brilliant morning sunshine  there would have been no way on earth I could have continued the journey, but I was keen not to become stranded in a lock flight.
 
Lapworth locks were quite hard work single handed, as they have no tail landing, which means opening the gates then using the ladder to get back on the boat, which isn’t too bad as the locks aren’t deep. In the snow however it meant taking everything half speed, as well as walking on to open the next lock and then back to close the previous one, trebling the distance walked at each lock and not being able to leave the boat unattended while going down due to the ice.  Its funny how some pounds and some locks were ice free, whereas other locks were frozen solid.

 

 

An icy lock scene at Lapworth flight

An icy lock scene at Lapworth flight

Worth noting for anyone who hasn’t broken ice to get into a lock, the ice fragments have a nasty habit of jamming  vertically between the brickwork and the boat, so when this happens there is even more work to do, making sure the boat isn’t hanging as it drops down the lock.  Smashing ice with a heavy shaft is also quite satisfying.
 
By the time I got to the bottom of the flight, 15 locks later, I was ready for a late lunch, which I ate in the sun wearing only a tee shirt and jeans after shedding a layer of clothing every hour on the way down!  The area around Kingswood Basin and its complex canal junction is a lovely location, very popular with dog walkers, and I can well understand why mooring vacancies here always attract a lot of interest, even though there are locks galore in every direction!
 
So Zulu is now moored just beyond the visitor moorings, close enough to walk to Lapworth station.
 
Thanks again to Matilda Rose blog, who reminded me that the Lapworth flight was no longer closed due to the early completion of the Lock 19 stoppage.  Looking at the fresh snow alongside each lock, I think I was the only boat to follow you all week.

Today I have done 2 miles and 15 locks which took just under 4 hours, ending up within a boat’s length of the Grand Union. Finally almost on the right canal but there’s still a long way to Uxbridge!  No point in rushing though, as Braunston and Buckby still have stoppages which could well be delayed until Easter due to the weather.

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Birmingham to Lapworth

February 21, 2010 by Mike · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Canals, Cruising Log 

Saturday 20th February 2010

Zulu going round Sherbourne Wharf, Birmingham

Zulu going round Sherbourne Wharf, Birmingham, in search of coal

Woke up to a very cold Birmingham and all thoughts of a dawn departure vanished into duvet land.

Good old Zulu’s 37 year old engine was good enough to start first time after two weeks resting and we set off to Cambrian Wharf for water, and then to Sherbourne Wharf for coal, to replace the two bags which were stolen while I was away.  Unfortunately they don’t sell it, so back to Gas Street Basin where Away 2 Service supplied a couple of bags of Taybrite for £9.00 each while I was passing through the Worcester Bar.

Other bloggers had recently noted the odd temporary bridge at Selly Oak where a new road is being built under the canal and adjoining railway line.  The canal will be closed here from Monday 22nd until 26th while a temporary canal diversion is built alongside, which to me sounds much more than 5 days work.  Meanwhile a chap turned up to raise the temporary bridge without asking, and called out to give it some power as other boats were going aground here.  Zulu doesn’t exactly do extra power, but I gave it all we had and rode up and over the mudbank without quite coming to a halt.

Turning left at Kings Norton and through the unique stop lock with its guillotine gates, open at each end for several decades I guess.  the surroundings become less industrial and at Shirley there’s a total transformation into open countryside.  This is certainly where people who want big houses live – there are some very attractive country houses and very nice places to moor after the grungy urban stopping points outside Birmingham itself.

Onwards towards Lapworth on a lovely sunny day, but the closer to Lapworth, the thicker the ice and the more snow on the ground.  I thought I was following another boat, but it must have been the one oncoming boat which I passed, as the broken channel I was following ended, leaving poor old Zulu an ever harder course through the ice.  The two lift bridges 26 and 28 near Lapworth are certainly fun single handed without snow and ice to contend with too! I ended up pulling the boat through and catching it as it went past under the bridges – well it seemed to work this time but theres something disconcerting about your boat sailing past without anyone on board, and no direct means of catching it unless the boat hook can reach it!

At the top of Lapworth at 5pm I was obviously the only boat of the day – the ice was getting thicker by the minute, so with less than an hour of daylight I decided to go down the first four locks and call it a day.  Which has worked out OK so far despite having to break fairly thick ice in places.

However as I tied up below lock 5 the ropes were freezing in my hands, and the temperature had already dropped to minus 4 and with a clear sky it seems perfect  conditions to become even colder.  If the ice permits in the morning I can look forward to another 15 locks in close succession, and if it doesn’t I can look forward to a lovely lie in.

Todays total : 17 miles and 4 locks.  Brrrrrhhhhhh.

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Progress report from Brewood

January 13, 2010 by Mike · 1 Comment
Filed under: Canals, Cruising Log 

Frozen Wolverhampton locks at Autherley

Frozen Wolverhampton locks at Autherley

Tuesday 12th January 2010

 

No progress.

Today I took a drive up to Brewood just to check that Zulu was OK in the cold.  Inside the cabin it had been minus 4 degrees and the water in the kettle was frozen solid.  What a good job I drained the water system down before leaving last week.

Apart from that, everything was fine, apart from the frozen canal of course.  Thin ice at Brewood, almost clear in places, turned very thick out of town.  For a moment, deceived by the lack of snow on the roads, I though it may even be possible to d a bit of boating this week, and I took the dog for a walk along the old railway towards Autherley Junction.  The Staffs and Worcester was once again ice free but up at the Junction it was even more frozen than last time and absolutely no sign of broken ice whatsoever, so unless someone can tell me otherwise, I don’t believe a single boat has managed to get up the Wolverhampton locks since I tried two weeks ago.

So back to the car, and back home just in time to miss the next wave of snow, which on Wednesday morning is now lying over 6 inches deep in places, with at least 2 inches of new snow falling overnight. 

Zulu will have to stay put for the foreseeable future.

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The right kind of snow but wrong kind of news

January 9, 2010 by Mike · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Canals 

The forecasters must be congratulating themselves this week, as certainly here in Berkshire we have had a good covering of snow – some 5 inches as at 9am on Wednesday, followed by three beautiful wintery days with a night time temperature reaching minus 9.5 and daytime not much over freezing.

But I knew the snow was coming towards us through another channel altogether, while the TV showed us spinning wheels on cars in Yorkshire, shot 12 hours ago and filmed normal streetscenes hoping someone may fall or at least slip on the ice, generally pumping out the same polished stories hour after hour. 

http://uksnow.benmarsh.co.uk maps Twitter messages (tweets) which use the special hash tag “#uksnow” along with a postcode and a measurement of the snow currently falling. For instance tweeting ”#uksnow NG9 6/10″ would place a “pin” in this map in real time. It will also disappear after a short time to ensure the info is bang up to date and not some out of date list.

Nobody demanded that thousands of contributers should post their local information this way – the great net applications propagate themselves and here is a superb example where one person has grabbed a growing trend on Twitter and maximized it’s effectiveness.  He even has an iPhone version for mobile use.

While BBC reporters in designer scarves search for local crises to justify their existance, people power is beginning to rule and the results are so much more specific that they actually mean something. Can the Beeb really justify the cost of hiring a helicopter to show us pictures of the M3 running pretty much normally last week?

For example today the BBC seem fixated on the number of schools closed due to the snow. 17? 170? 1700? what does it mean? Is your school in this number?  Sounds good on the news but totally meaningless.

Apply the #uksnow principal and have every school tweet it’s real time status. Suddenly your school is in the map, quite literally and the meaningless stats are now so relevant.

Now back to canals. The press are never going to cover the ice on the canals in any detail, although today BW did declare that 90% of canals are iced over which is better than saying 1,700 miles are iced over but still meaningless if I want to check if Wolverhampton locks are passable.

People power to the rescue then! One of the contributors to waterscape.com has aleady produced a canal ice map which will read twitter tweets containing the tag #canalice. For once we seem almost ahead of the game!  It needs some work to locate the tweets properly, but its the start of something very powerful. http://www.waterscape.com/blog/authors/chris/canal-ice

Maybe too late to become popular enough to be useful this week but it looks like we need to get used to the extreme conditions so let’s get used to updating each other too!

Join Twitter, send regular posts containing #canalice, a canal name and a location and lets see if we can make this thing take off!

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Waiting for the thaw

January 3, 2010 by Mike · 1 Comment
Filed under: Canals, Cruising Log 

Sunday 3rd January 2010

I left Zulu in Brewood on Friday night, hoping somehow that this cold weather would be over within a couple of days, but it rather looks like it could be well over a week before the trip can be resumed with the weather still getting worse in places.

Sadly this means that I will miss my main deadline of reaching Braunston Tunnel cutting before 11th January, after which the canal is closed there until 5th March, unless BW can be persuaded to allow the occasional convoy of stranded boats to pass through.  I will call them tomorrow to check if they have even managed to get their own boats in position before giving up totally.

Having left Zulu and headed south by road, I can confirm that the Newbury area Kennet and Avon is currently ice free, and whilst thick in places, the ice is certainly breakable all the way up to Crofton, as a couple of boats have made the trip over the weekend.

Such is the power of blogging though, a quick search of other canal blogs shows me that Great Haywood is mostly iced in according to Caxton’s blog, so I am thankful that I didn’t divert all the way up the Staffs and Worcester just to get stuck there, and Norbury Junction, which I passed through a couple of days earlier, has frozen again yesterday according to Debdale.  Worse still, Epiphany tells us (and confimed today by email) that Birmingham centre is more or less impassable with 5 inch thick ice at Rotten Park.  So even if I had forced my way to Wolverhampton it now seems likely I would now be stuck somewhere  in no mans land instead of relatively cosy at Brewood.  There are also a couple of threads running on Canalword.net forums where people are posting ice reports, and then of course there is twitter where Granny Buttons was encouraging the use of a #canalice tag to enable searching of relevant topics.  This could form an  invaluable facility if more people start using it – particularly useful as it can be checked and updated using mobile phones in real time.  It is just as useful if people would also post “no ice” posts as well as reporting thick ice.

But right now on this lovely sunny afternoon down south, I have no way of knowing if conditions on the Birmingham Canal Main Line are changing or even if Brewood is deep in snow. 

So if anyone can keep me updated on this I would really appreciate it and if anyone wants an update on the eastern Kennet and Avon then I will be only too happy to report back what I can.

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