Double 0 Life

 We have had a lovely time catching up with friends, sorting out doctors and dentists, new shoes and I have joined a new band.  We have had several train trips to Birmingham and Malvern, also Cheltenham Spa, and have had many visitors to our boat, which continues to be a delight. Band playing in the park in Malvern I also snuck off to Mallorca for 5 days to visit my brother, Phil This is a leisure mooring which we will keep so that we can come back and drop off Double 0 at any time, eg Winter!!   We are rediscovering our hometown and have had fine weather. This week, however, we had a break in the social calendar and took off to do the Droitwich circuit.  this involved our very first River experience. After working up the confidence, we set our of our protected marina and motored into the locks. https://youtu.be/ic1J6fXrJ9Q?si=IDNLzztC7ws-4qdt We continued up the river for half an hour or so and turned right into the Droitwich arm.  This used to be closed a...

It would take more than one sleep to recover from Tardebigge, and we still had the remaining 7 locks, plus some more individual ones after that, before we got there . We shared the driving and lock work as my body was screaming at me to stop winding lock  gates.   The rain set in as predicted, but there were some gaps. Deceptive sunny spells lured us into thinking we wouldn’t need to wear our waterproof trousers. You can guess the rest.    We got soaked a couple of times for sure, but the Worcestershire countryside kept our spirits up. Everything was starting to look familiar. We tried to moor up. We didn’t want to arrive just yet, we were having so much fun, but we couldn’t find the right spot.  Finally, we motored into Worcester’s canal side suburbs and found a lovely new mooring place with rings set into the concrete to tie up to. We love mooring rings!      Note this humpback bridge. When I first met Andy, he lived near here and we used to com...

 Worcester still being 58 locks away, we got up early and decided to get on with it. We passed through Alvechurch, another suburban canal side development, and went through 2 short tunnels. Getting good at this now😉 Tardebigge is a flight of 36 locks in 4 miles 😳 We knew it was coming and now we’d arrived we knew we just had to get on with it. Someone coming up said it took them about 4 hours. He said this as he jumped between the open lock gates, which we just don’t do. I calculated around 5 hours for us, one lock after the other. It was already 11.30am, but the weather forecast for the next day was solid rain, so we had a cup of tea, made some sandwiches and bit the bullet. We decided, also, to share the driving and lock winding. 😀👍 Hmmm 🤔  A single lock with no other boat coming up the flight involves:- i.  Unwind very stiff lock gate with windlass. Carefully traverse lock gate to the other side and repeat the process. Wait for lock to fill and carefully cross bac...

Onwards from the pub to the next flight of locks, the Lapworth flight. This was fine, but we were getting concerned that we had only seen one place where you could stock up with Diesel, way back, and we were not sure if our gauge was working. Andy kept dipping the tank and it seemed we might have half a tank left, but when we finally passed a marina that sold fuel we reversed and moored up to get some. I’m making this sound easy.  Filling a tank while holding onto the centre line while moored alongside the marina owner’s boat! Other boaters not being aware were going past quite fast, disturbing the water and causing the boats to separate…., and I found myself trying to do the splits to keep from falling in the canal.  But we filled up with fuel and water somehow. This is always a good feeling, so we continued very merrily along past the Southern suburbs of Birmingham. We thought this would be ugly, but a lot of canalside development has improved the look from the water, and it...

 We left the Hatton flight behind after an overnight pub stop, and had some fairly uneventful motoring towards the Kingswood junction.  This involved the Shrewley tunnel, which was a doddle after Braunston. It has an extra tunnel for the horses to go through as there wasn’t room for a towpath!  Our next drama was a bit of a surprise. At the Kingswood junction, we knew we would have to negotiate a left turn, and then get the correct right hand turn to get on the Warwickshire ring.  None of this is anything like you would expect. The canal pound was quite shallow, and Andy took a wide turn before attempting to turn the sharp left hand turn. Before he knew it the bow of Double 0 had mounted the shallow right hand sandbank instead of going left, and we were listing, stuck, dead stopped and looking embarrassed to say the least. A few swear words, and me pushing like hell with a barge pole, it was no use. Stuck solid on the sandbank. Fortunately, other boaters tend to be f...

 So we went from Leamington Spa to Warwick, with a couple of nights moored by a lovely canal side pub, basking in sunshine.  We spent a whole day looking round Warwick Castle which dates back originally to 1068, when William the Conqueror built a wooden Fortress, upgraded by Henry VIII much later. It is a great day out, not just the castle, full of Madame Tussaud’s wax figures, but also a couple of medieval shows, including a falconry display.  We stayed an extra couple of days round the bend in Saltisford Marina (thank you Margy!) and Andy’s girls drove up together and paid us a visit  So after a week of laundry, shopping, and many pub lunches, we recognised that this was all an avoidance ploy as the next stage of our journey involved doing 21 locks in a row, the Hatton staircase!  So Monday morning we were up bright and early, fenders down, Windlass located. All we had to do was empty our black water tank. The Marina crew were ready, when suddenly I realised w...

 Lost track of time, but on Sunday it was 26 degrees and we did 10 locks in the heat. Lucky for me we shared the locks with another boat, but the following day I made sure to do all the manoeuvres so that Andy could do some winding!  We are now in Leamington Spa, moored right by the town. At last we have some accessible shops! Raining today, but our boat is cosy.  I got my clarinet fixed in a fabulous music shop, and Andy got his watchstrap repaired. Nice town. We’ll stay a couple of days.