Good food and shallow pounds

Another wonderful weekends boating. NOT! Started off great and ended great but the middle bit – We had booked a couple of extra days off work to bring Minnow back from the Black Country Museum. Left the museum at just after 8.00am and ‘bonked’ round to the top of the 21 by half ten. 1.0pm saw us pulling round the turn at Aldersley after having a bad road all the way down the flight as we were following another boat and did not pass anyone coming up the flight . By half two we were mooring up outside the Fox & Anchor where we spent an enjoyable evening, me with a beautiful tender shoulder of lamb and Dawn with her usual Beef and Guinness pie, little did we know what sort of day lay ahead of us. With the lamp on at 8.00am we were away by quarter past and were making the turn at Hatherton by nine. All went well until we came down Gailey lock wnen we were greeted with the pound running about 4inches low, but that was nothing for every pound from here to Tixall lock were all running at least this low with a couple at least nine inches down and the pound running down to Otherton lock about 12” down. It was such a relief when we eventually got through Tixall lock and back to a reasonable depth. The second night we tied up at The Radford Bank for one of our regular ‘value for money’ carvery. We were away by 7.50 the next morning and were making the turn at Great Hayward Junction by 9.50am. By just after 1.00pm we were back at our mooring and tying up. Loaded the car and headed home after collecting my car from the Black Country Museum. Apart from a trip up to Norbury at the end of October this brings our 2010 boating season to an end and once again we have enjoyed ourselves but a couple of things have become very apparent to us which I will blog about over the next couple of days. One is to do with the inefficient use of moneys/labour by British Waterways, and then second to do with old fools and Bolinders, so till next time as always

Don’t bang ‘em about

Blossom