Halesowen to Tipton 15th to 17th May

A quiet night was spent, with no rogues appearing to take an interest in us overnight. Andrew having clocked that I was having a tussle opening a can of beans, rushed off in dawn's early light to be outside a hardware shop as it opened, to get a new tin opener. I had coffee ready for his return, and then away we went down the Dudley No. 2 canal, right to the current end of navigation at Hawne Basin. Originally it connected to the Worcester and Birmingham canal but mining subsidence caused the closure of the through route.

Even so, there is one tunnel, 

(You can just see the exit as a tiny pinprick of light ) with a section in the middle where it's drooped.

Not so low that I needed to get  off my steering step though.

And into the basin, through a very low and narrow bridge.

 I dipped out of doing that and let Andrew take over. Onto the wharf, for diesel,  pump out, water, and laundry. Then onto a mooring for the night, and long, hot showers.

Here are some of our neighbours:

The Basin is run by a group of volunteers who took control of what was an abandoned wasteland and set up the current operation. 

They offer a certain amount of free mooring to encourage boats to use the canal, and their diesel and pump out costs are excellent value. So where we can, we always like to make the trip.

Saturday morning dawned calm, with potential rain should we find ourselves under a particularly heavy cloud. We had a good chat with a friend of ours, Francis, who's very involved with the BCNS (Birmingham Canals Navigation Society) and whom we will meet with next weekend.

 So time to shrug and get moving. 

9am start, before Francis and crew get their deep draughted working boat, nb Malus, underway. If we found Gosty Tunnel shallow, they will have to go very slowly indeed.

Andrew had all the same problems I did, if not worse.. we had full water and fuel tanks so we're sitting lower in the water.  At one point we were going so slowly that I did a Titanic and sat right on the nose of the boat, to help with the trim. The back end is always deepest, so if my solid little person could bring the nose down a bit, it might lift the stern just enough to get out of the sludge.  And the bridge where I merrily drove straight into the edge because the steering just Was Not Happening.. Andrew got horribly stuck and we had to be rescued by a passerby who took our barge pole, and pushed absolutely mightily on our stern until we finally got loose. What a star!

The weather was fairly miserable and the light poor, so few photos. Here's an abandoned clutch of Canada goose eggs, goodness knows why. A second nest abandoned on the same stretch, about 3 metres away. Odd.

Into our second tunnel. Deeper, wider, but also very long and very chilly. And then we got stopped in our tracks by rubbish round the propellor.

By which time Andrew was deeply miserable.  On to our flight of 3 locks where, after seeing no boats moving for days, we found 2. Not only that, but the locks were in our favour so they waited and helped work us up! At last our mooring was  in sight. The prop was so fouled with weed, though, that we wondered if we'd ever get there.

Of course we did eventually,

 but the trip had taken 1 1/2 hours longer than it should have.  Day off tomorrow, hurray!