Oozells Street Loop, Birmingham

It was quite noisy last night until the early hours when it all went quite, traffic, police sirens etc. but quite quiet this morning.

Last nights moorings

The boat ahead moved off this morning as I went to the loo, but he was back moored in the same spot by breakfast, he could only have gone to Aston junction to wind, but if he did he must also have winded directly behind us and I was almost opposite the winding hole.
We left at our normal 10 am. chugged down to Aston junction where we turned left. There is nothing on the top gate of the Aston flight to indicate the flight is closed further down. Going up towards the Farmers Bridge flight there is a tremendous amount of building work going on, all high rise of course.

Lock 13 of the Farmers Bridge flight was full and against us but the rest were empty or only part full. Almost all the scaffolding has gone from the flight and a team were removing the last bits from the offside .

We had quite a good run up the flight, there was only one lock that needed us both on the beam to open the bottom gate. At the top lock there were two CRT chuggers talking to passer-by’s and one of them couldn’t understand how Harnser moved forward with no one onboard when I opened the top gate, wound the paddle down and stepped on as she started coming out.
Diana noticed a mooring space at the end of Cambrian wharf so I reversed back passed a couple of boat to tuck in, the chap off the back boat came out and took a mooring rope for me and then told Diana it gets noisy here on a Friday and Saturday night and he was going to move to Oozells Street, we decided to do the same thing.
After lunch we wandered down to look round the Christmas market and then to the veg market down by the Bull Ring.

Today’s Journey

1¾ miles, 13 locks in 2 hours