Stourport Basin Sunday 27 December 2015

Another wet night and this morning there wasn’t a breath of wind, the mist and drizzle hung in the hills, We set off at 10-30am after I flashed the alternator up to charge the batteries. The canal is set hard against the rock face in lots of places and in some they had to cut right through the rock. It was just after here we saw the only other boat of the day coming towards us, I hire boat. I got a bit to close to the tow path and stopped dead on some rock as he slid passed us. I have noticed at a few of the locks these long steel poles, painted white with what looks like a windlass stub on one end, for the life of me I can’t think what they are for.

At Wolverley Court lock the tail bridge is, like lots down here or the cantilever design. This one was designed with three supports running from the wall the the centre so I can only assume that they felt 3 were required. Over the years on one side 2 of the 3 have been snapped off, so there is now only one doing the work supporting the bridge deck. Was this over engineering by the builders or just good luck.

When some of the offside trees were cut down some one decided to carve these stumps into Kingfishers. The beaks are a different colour so I wonder if they have been snapped off and replaced or just stained.

We passed the butty Phoebe moored up and the art work on her block caught my eye with a scene from the Potteries. A brief stop was made in Kidderminster to visit Maplin’s so hopefully tomorrow the alternator will self excite when I start the engine. I had to take the classic shot as we approached Kidderminster lock, looking back. At the moment they are building a new bypass for Kidderminster to the south of the town, The main carcass of the bridge is in, crossing both the canal and the river Stour. 

There are visitor moorings just above the lock dropping down into the basin, I did consider winding above the lock, it looks pretty wide there but in the end decided to drop into the basin to wind before locking up again to moor. What we didn’t know was that there are a couple of 24 hour moorings in the basin by the services, one had a boat on it already but we squeezed in just in front or them, it will be handy for topping up with water in the morning. Needless to say as we started to turn round in the basin it started to rain, so again we have wet trousers. The basin is packed with long term moorings, if they ever go up the Staffs & Worcs Canal together it will be mayhem. Some of them wont fit on the canal and can only go down the river Severn via the wide locks, there is a set of narrow locks for us tin slugs to use if we want to go that way.

Today’s Journey  7½ miles, 7 locks in 4 hours.