Could have been worse

Monday 17^th April; Stourport to Wolverley Court lock

After rather a rubbish night’s sleep, we were up fairly early.  The water level in the cabin bilge had not changed, which was a relief.  Dave took Meg for a walk to check out the location of Starline cruisers, and was lucky enough to meet the chap opening up at about 7.45.  He told us to come up to their pontoon for 9 o’clock, which we did.

Dave bringing Bonjour round to the bottom lock

While I waited for him I took photos of the wild flowers growing on the bank above the bottom lock.

Cuckoo flower

Cowslips

The Stourport bottom lock is a dear little thing compared to the massive beast at Worcester.  In fact Stourport has two sets of little staircase locks as opposed to two deep wide ones at Worcester, and they are much easier to use – as long as you remember to wait for the second set to be ready for you before leaving the first.  They are offset, and if you float about between them while waiting for the second to be ready you will probably get blown or moved off course by currents, and have trouble straightening up again.

A volunteer was around and helped us, glad to have something to do as there have been few boats travelling while the Severn has been on red or amber.  We pulled straight onto the Starline pontoon, which is also the lock mooring, and the engineer was on board by 9.15. 

He went through all the obvious things, as Dave had done, and worked his way through the boat.  I took Meg off out of the way to walk around the basin area and dispose of the rubbish.  Annoyingly it was drizzling and I hadn’t got my waterproof, but it was only light.  The inner basin has had new flats built all round it, and although it has pontoons and a row of buoys there are no boats.  Have they been booted out as too noisy/smoky/untidy for a polite new development?

The Tontine hotel, which closed some time ago, now seems to be smart new apartments.

When we returned to the boat, the engineer had used the pump-out machine to drain the cabin bilge.

He couldn’t get it all out – we will need to use a sponge and bucket, and eventually nappies, to remove the rest.  But he had come up with a likely cause of the problem, which interestingly I saw mentioned in passing on a forum about water in cabin bilges.  He showed us that when you remove the water filler cap, there is a gap between the top of the tank inlet pipe and the filler cap.  Chuffed’s water tank was integral, ie its sides were the sides of the boat and its top was the well deck, so when water started draining over the side of the boat we knew that the tank was full.  Sadly that doesn’t work on Bonjour!  When we filled the tank last time, we were surprised that it was taking so long to fill – it never did overflow, as the cabin bilge must have been filling instead!  If you look down the hole, you can see the outside of the tank (to the right and above) where the pipe meets it.

And what’s more the pipe isn’t even directly beneath the filler cap.  So now we will be very careful when we top up the water.  For the next few days we will be sponging out water from the bilge tank and monitoring the water levels.  We finally left the basin at about 11 o’clock and made our way out of Stourport.  Under the old railway bridge we spotted this cotton-reel style roller opposite the old Railway Basin.

Towropes were passed round it to assist horses hauling boats out of the basin.  We cruised on, making a brief stop for lunch, through the countryside to Kidderminster, where we moored to visit Sainsburys and Halfords, then continued on to the mooring above Wolverley Court lock.  Someone around here carves tree-stumps into birds and there are several examples of their work from the Black Star pub in Stourport onwards.  This is the first coloured example we have seen.

My best kingfisher photo yet!

The mooring was lovely, quiet apart from birdsong and croaking frogs in the reed bed opposite.  We  saw our first swallows of the year today.  I hope they can find enough to eat, it's not exactly warm at the moment!

5½ miles, 8 locks