Fierce deep broad locks

Sunday 19^th July; Shardlow to Swarkestone

It was decidedly cool this morning.  We moved along to the water point and filled up before tackling Shardlow lock, so it was well after 9 before we got going.  The next few locks are all doubles and we weren’t looking forward to them.  I remembered Aston and Weston locks (the namesakes of two locks between Haywood junction and Stone) as being very heavy to work.  And there seems to be no good way of dealing with the top paddles going up, other than very slowly and carefully.  The method that works on the Hatton flight, of opening the ground paddle the same side as your boat to hold it into the side, does not work here.  And the gate paddles are so fierce it is absolutely essential to let the water rise well above the cill before you start, very slowly, to open them.   After Shardlow lock, which isn't very deep, there was a mile or so before Aston lock.  The next few locks are broad, deep, slow and fierce.  I was going to try opening the opposite ground paddle first on this lock to see if it made a difference, but I didn’t for some reason, can’t remember why now, maybe the paddle wasn’t working.  When we were almost at the top  I saw a woman arriving at the bottom gates with a windlass and wondered if her boat would catch us up by Weston.  As we left I spotted a once-familiar boat.

Seyella used to be owned by Geoff and Mags who now I believe live in a Dutch Barge at Pilling’s Lock Marina .

We hadn’t realised that the chap who helped us close up the lock as he walked his dog is the current owner.  Seyella looks very well cared for.

On the approach to Weston lock and immediately below it there is a lot of vegetation, and we could see a massive widebeam on the lock landing.  I thought it might make a good photo, this great wide thing going into the lock, as long as the boats just leaving didn’t get in the way.  One had to make a difficult-looking reverse manoeuvre to pick up the crew, and eventually got close enough to pass us the information that the widebeam was all closed up. And to look out for the bywash!

Squatting

The widebeam's bow rope was tied to the first bollard, so technically he was only just on the landing, but his great width made dropping off your crew rather tricky, as the bywash was strong and did complicate matters somewhat.  A mobility scooter was sitting outside, and there was a ramp access to get onto the road, so I suppose they thought as they were pulled right back it would be all right.  A novice steerer would have had real trouble using the landing though. 

Anyway, by the time I had got up to the bridge I could see a boat approaching in the distance, so with both gates already open I just hung around till they arrived.  It was Fanfare, which we have been leap-frogging for a couple of days.  With one of the ground paddles out there was plenty of time to chat, and grumble about inconsiderate mooring.  The man lived in Zambia and had hired the boat from Rose Narrowboats for the summer.  He had been joined for a couple of weeks by his sister, who lives in Belgium and is a potter, working at her studio in France for half the year.  They were hoping to get to Stoke for her to visit one of the potteries before she returns to France.  They stopped to take on water so we went on alone.

Fine George’s bridge. Who was Fine George?

I took the photo thinking it had ornate metalwork above the brick parapets, but that turned out to be an illusion.  In fact it was the scaffolding for works on ‘ZLA Recovery’ for the National Grid.  ZLA is the 400 kV Overhead Transmission Line route stretching between the substations at Ryton (near Coventry) and Ratcliffe-on-Soar .  In other words, ‘a large-scale engineering and maintenance project’ managed by Balfour Beatty ‘to restore, upgrade, or entirely "reconductor" these ageing power lines to strengthen network resilience’.  So now you know.

Looking back at the works

At Swarkestone, the last lock of the day, a boat was just leaving the bottom and with two waiting at the top we went straight in.  One of the boats was local to the area, and as a crew member of the other boat had gone across we started to chat, as you do, when we broke off to shriek NO!!!! at the lady on the other side who was on the point of winding up the gate paddle.  It all went very smoothly after that with no harm done and an important lesson learned.  I went over to do the gate paddle myself and explain about these paddles, and she realised at once what the issue was.  We pulled in after bridge 15, in a bit of shade. 

The crane at Swarkestone is at the old junction where there was a link with several locks down to the Trent

The boat wi-fi was too weak to use, phone tethering was slow too, but there was an excellent TV signal for the World Cup final.

6 miles 4 locks.

Adam commented on yesterday's blog that in May he made a podcast episode  with Forces Veterans Afloat, which I mentioned yesterday.  Today, there was a post on the Droitwich Spa Marina Facebook page by Catherine of Cafwin Cruises, who have two hire boats at the marina – they have donated a week aboard the electric Ollie Owl, as a raffle prize for the charity. Just £5 a ticket.