Sprint
The next day too was a wet one, so just a three hours 'sprint' under Spaghetti Junction on to the Birmingham & Fazeley Canal. Some of you will know that it is a very acute turn from one waterway to another, and even our 54ft boat needed to touch the wall to spin round, but here are two very prominent notices telling boaters not to do that! Obviously with the bow on the wall it is then a simple matter to face around, otherwise it would be quite a shuffling job, so we used the wall. How a full 70ft boat could possibly get round without using the wall to rest its bow, is beyond me.
I notice that the M6 at Spaghetti is falling down, with contractors very hard at it attempting to make it safe. The age old problem with concrete and steel reinforcing is that once water or air gets to the steel it starts to rust, and like those Walls of Jericho, things tend to take a turn for the worse. The reason for all those sensors on the pilings that you can see from the waterways tell if things are not as they should be. The contractors had pipes into the canal with buoys keeping us away but sending us into the offside bushes. If they were taking our water, surely they could have sucked it up from the river below. Mind you, as far as I could see there was little shortage.
Still no moving boats
All the way from Wolverhampton to well onto the Birmingham & Fazeley all the waterways were well up, with water going over the weirs, so no shortage there. But what about boats? Still meeting no moving boats since the lone hire boat on the '21'. We were well on the Birmingham & Fazeley Canal when at last we met a solitary narrowboat at Curdworth Locks—the first in three days cruising though the waterways capital of the country well into the season. I calculated 30 miles with one solitary boat passing us. These are not ridiculous statistics obtained by somebody at the end of a telephone, but by actually being there and seeing for ourselves. Perhaps the directors at British Waterways should do the same.
It was then Saturday, so the anglers of the Birmingham Angling Association were out on the Birmingham & Fazeley Canal on the pound below the first of Curdworth locks, and I could see the late arrivals busy ripping out the vegetation, letting it float down the waterway. And it was just our bad luck to come across that already removed, that had piled up inside the second lock. We ignored it at our peril, for it became wedged behind the bottom gate jamming the boat as we tried to move forward.
This was pulled out, and a second attempt made to exit the lock, but the pile had jammed underneath between the boat and the bottom of the lock, so with visions of it all finishing up wrapped around the skeg, we backed off again whilst She Who Must had her turn at removing the damn stuff. I don't expect there would be much use telling the anglers not to do it, not in view of the notice they take not to fish on lock moorings...