Gas Street Basin Birmingham

Tuesday 1st November

s The weather has been amazing up to today, the canal is very shallow, and we have been stuck a couple of times, but managed to stop for water on route.
First thing today we had to open a road bridge, which was great fun, stopping the traffic whilst the nachine lifted the bridge for ageoff to go through, bet at 8.55am a few drivers cursed us.
Today was lock free, accept one at the end of Stratford Canal, which is no longer working, an old fashioned guillotine type, we crawled through the narrow gate, and then had to take a sharp right turn onto the Worcester and Birmingham Canal, passed the Bourneville factory.

As we were driving along, we heard this strange noise, I looked behind and saw something disappearing into the water, which was bright orange, we pulled up, and Geoff used the boat hook to see if he could find anything, but No nothing there, so we started again, and I saw it again, so I took the tiller, and Geoff tried to lasso the thing, which he did, very impressed, we pulled up again, and found we had picked up a plastic temporary barrier, it was about four feet long and three foot high, so glad we managed to free it, we left it on the side of the canal, just hoping it doesn’t get thrown in again!

The Worcester and Birmingham canal was very muddy and shallow, and the leaves were causing us problems, we had to stop every now and then, and go in reverse just to free prop from the leaves, through another tunnel as we approached Birmingham things improved, and we arrived at lunch time, cold and hungry.

We popped out to get fresh rolls, soup and milk, and had a lovely warm lunch, back on board.

Looking forward to exploring tomorrow, at present it has turned very cold, and we are now making plans to find a Marina and leave the boat.