Created Monday, Jun 30th 2025 08:03Z, last updated Tuesday, Jul 15th 2025 20:00Z
Sarah and I are going to make the canals in middle England unsafe in the next two weeks taking our narrow boat on a tour around Birmingham.
In these two weeks I am grossly limiting my work on AVH to a maximum of 3 hours a day including reading my mail and following up on the most important occurrences.
Update by Sarah on Jul 7th 2025:
Quote:
Hello all
we are one week into our voyage into the deepest, darkest depths of Birmingham and its hinterlands. We have been roasting in the sun and now we are being blown from one side of the canal to the other, by strong crosswinds exceeding our crosswind limits.
I am of course the Skipper, having years of narrow boat experience under my belt. Simon is doing well, this being his second trip, and he hasn’t had to visit A&E yet, as in the last trip (another story). I however, have now experienced Solihull Hospital, 3 days ago, when a blackberry bramble strike caught my finger and became infected extremely quickly. I was accelerated past everyone in A&E, (much to their annoyance) for a precaution against sepsis, with the infection spreading. All mending now.
The water levels have been tricky, having had such a dry Spring, so we have rerouted a few times and are now on Plan D, with canals being closed all around us: one literally just after we passed the the last lock on it. Gas Street Basin, in the middle of Birmingham last night was impressive, really amazing regeneration since I went there in the late Seventies, (as a child obviously) !!
Unfortunately there was one occurrence today, which needs noting as an accident - as there was injury and damage - but mostly to my pride ! I was struggling with pulling up a difficult ground paddle with my windlass, when it suddenly released leading me to receive a sudden tail strike, after falling backwards in a most ignominious fashion and apparently damage can be seen (and felt when sitting).
Anyway these are all part and package of living the roving life, and as long as there is a good canal side pub at the end of the day we are happy. We both look like ancient sea-dogs now, out in all weathers - but keeping Simon to only three hours of AVH is not always the easiest of tasks !
So readers, encourage Simon to keep me company, at least most of the time, when I am at the tiller - it can be lonely out back - and we have 6 days of adventuring left.
Sarah
End of Quote
Update Jul 15th 2025 (by Simon):
Your (reader) and Sarah's wishes came true, the fridge answered and came to rescue!
It almost looked like Sarah and the fridge were in secret agreement to limit my working by also cutting my power short for running the laptop.
A few days after departure, during which the battery of the boat was happily supplying both laptop (for charging) and the fridge, the fridge started to go into error during the night. It would attempt to start the compressor, but the compressor would not come up causing an error light to flash and the fridge to lose cooling.
After two nights or so we found out that the boat battery was no longer capable to support both laptop charging and fridge - only the running engine could do that (which however is prohibited to be operated during the night and can only be run for about 6-7 hours per day unless we want to run out of fuel).
So I had to change and limit my working schedule indeed: during the day, while the engine was running, charge both my laptop and a power bank, with the laptop being turned off throughout the night. In the mornings, while I already got up and Sarah still sleeping, I would then be able to work AVH, before powerbank and laptop battery in combination would run out of power.
Sarah and I are a bit sad today that our beautiful canal trip has ended. Even I finally started to enjoy the "slowness of life" almost shocking Sarah when I made that statement.
Nonetheless, the last few days had a few surprises for us. First of all, on Saturday last week at around 11am a tree broke and fell right into the canal ahead of us, blocking our way back to the boat yard for almost a day. We needed to divert and moore up whereever we could. The holds were all full as a huge traffic jam of boats formed on the canal, mooring places were hard to get while waiting that our floatway became free ahead of us. We needed to call the boat yard to tell them about this mishap and resulting delay, as we would not able to deliver the boat back to the yard on time because of that tree.
On Sunday contractors arrived with three men, a boat, a buggy, a chainsaw and some more tools and began to cut the tree down. When there was a gap already almost sufficient to let boats through, they managed to bend their chainsaw and needed to continue with a manual saw. Finally the way was free at around 12:30pm, we managed to get through the lock as the third boat and past the tree and went towards the yard at highest speed possible (still the slowness of life active, highest speed may have been about 4 miles per hour).
We came through a lock, when we noticed a boat moored up to our left shortly after the lock at a pretty narrow point of the canal, a small "island" of swimming weed was drifting towards the right seemingly leaving just a narrow gap in the middle of the canal, which I - steering the boat at that time with Sarah sitting besides me - could not see. Suddenly I felt the boat became extremely heavy as if we had hit something, I put the engine briefly into reverse, then forward again, when the occupants of the other boat began to shout to turn the engine off, what I did permitting the boat to drift towards the bank. Sarah managed to get onto the ground and pull us in, we moored up and discovered a huge pile of weed behind our boat and entangled with our propeller.
It turned out, there had been two swimming islands of weed, the small one we could see, and a much larger one to the left of it blocking the entire canal. Being focussed on avoiding the moored up boat and the visible weed, both Sarah and I overlooked the bigger obstacle.
So, open the weed box, and clear the propeller. It took about 90 minutes ripping the weed out from around the propeller, then use the hook to clear weed from the back of the boat, and throwing all that stuff onto the bank, where finally about a 100kg/200 pound of weed piled up. Then we were able to continue our (already delayed) journey towards the yard.
It was a wonderful adventure all along, and we are really sad that the adventure has concluded.
Now, I am about to catch up with all the work that has not been done in the past two weeks and return to normal working schedule.
Photo of Sarah and Simon at Stourbridge,EN (UK) at reader request:
