Gothersley Rough Thursday 31 July 2014

We were away at 9 am, one boat had already passed but it wasn’t long before we were meeting boats thick and fast, sometimes three at one lock and nothing ahead. There are more faces on the cut, some even on to of CaRT posts. We arrived at the top of Bratch to be told it would be between half and three quarters of an hour wait as a boat had just entered the bottom lock to come up and they do three up, three down. In the end there were only two boats to come up and we waited thirty five minutes. Bratch is not a staircase but three individual lock connected by a very short pound that in turn is connected to a side pound.
there is a full time CaRT lock keeper who is assisted by a volunteer, he in turn was assisted by my Grandson.

We were soon on our way through Bumblehole lock and on to Botterham Staircase locks, these a real staircase with the top lock empting into the bottom.  As the boat ahead of us had gone down we had to fill the top lock to go in and empty the bottom lock before dropping the contents of the top lock into it. As you can see the sky is turning black behind us.

As we left Hinksford Lock it started to rain which got quite heavy, we needed water but were just beaten to the water point by a boat coming up and when we did get on the tap was quite slow. The road was flooded just passed Greenforge bridge at but it didn’t slow the cars down. Once topped up we continued down through Greenforge lock and soon the sun came back out, we were going to overnight on the 48 hr moorings but it has 100% tree canopy cover so I could imagine it dripping all night so we did another couple of locks, again meeting boats to finally stop on a 5 day mooring at Gothersley Rough by the remains wall structure.