Plenty Locks Now

Monday 16 June

We braced ourselves for a whole series of locks over the next couple of days. By lunchtime we were at Lapworth top lock and began to descend the 19 locks in this flight. Typical of the Stratford canal the winding mechanisms were not in a good state of repair with great effort required on some of them. Also some of the bottom gates would not stay closed so it looked as though we had purposely left them open for the boat that was following us two locks up.

Knackered!

 

We found some quiet moorings and made our way to the Tom O' The Wood pug for some well deserved refreshments.

Tuesday 17 June

 We knew that we had another flight ahead of us today in the form of the Hatton 21 and also knew that they were wide locks. We didn't fancy working these by ourselves so we decided to wait for another boat at the top lock in order to share. Making use of the time we found a completely empty bottle bank and we did our best to fill it by dumping the evidence of our first six days of cruising!
Keith spotted a Canal and River Trust volunteer lockkeeper a few locks down so off he went to exchange stories between the Hatton flight and the Bath flight where Keith operates on a Thursday. The chap, who lives locally, kindly offered to help us down the bulk of the flight if no boat turned up; bless him.
After an hour an eight week old hire boat turned up with evidence of "lock rash" and a broken window. Oh dear we thought. Keith invited them to share the locks and they eagerly accepted. We had no need to worry as they were very competent having hired boats for the last 14 years. Thank you the crew of Rosana for a very pleasant descent in only two and a quarter hours!

Hatton Flight

 

 

 

Running a bit short of supplies we wandered off to Sainsburys for top-up and booked an evening meal at the Cape of Good Hope for later.