Saturday 17th August
The weather turned out not to be anywhere near as bad as the forecast would have had us believe, no rain to speak of and the strong winds didn’t arrive until later in the day so we were glad we decided to move on. We have travelled 6.5 miles and 7 locks from Kinver to Swindon. This took over 4 hours because as well as the twists and turns there are a lot of moored boats along this section.
This end of the Staffs and Worcester canal is certainly picturesque with many points of interest to be seen along the way. Most of the locks have something interesting to look at, a lovely view or a nice cottage. Hyde Lock Cottage for example has a miniature pair of replica lock gates as a garden gate and Greensforge Lock Cottage has a beautiful cottage garden in bloom. We have previously only done the section from Great Haywood to Autherley Junction and have always turned off on to the Shroppie there. We think it is deadly dull compared to this end.
We were going to moor at Greensforge but the moorings were totally tree lined. I had previously had a conversation with someone at Stewpony Lock and he had said that this would be the case. He said they always preferred to moor at Swindon where it was more open so we decided to follow his example and carried on. We are moored just downstream of the lock and it is ok here.
Sunday 18th August
As these are 48 hour moorings we decided to stop here today and do a bit of maintenance. This was, as it turned out, a good thing because when Ken lifted the boards over the engine he found the engine bay was full of water! It seems the container we put under the stern tube, with the bilge pump in, after we cleaned it out last time, to catch any drips there were, had moved and the water had missed the container and filled the bilge then run over into the engine bay.
We subsequently spent the morning getting rid of the water! I had to lay on the engine and reach down into the bilge, soak up the water with a sponge and squeeze it into a jug, then pass it up to Ken to tip into a bucket. When that was done Ken rigged up our spare pump and we pumped 8 buckets of water out of the engine bay! When we had got rid of the water Ken tightened up the nuts on the stern gland. We will be keeping an eye on things more carefully now!
Following all this activity I did a bit of washing then as I felt a bit dodgy (all that dangling over the engine probably) I had to have a lie down while Ken went to the pub for his recovery!
Tomorrow we have a fairly busy day planned with several miles and locks to do. We’re not sure where we are going to stop.
