The long and the short of it all was that it took SIX hours to cut away all of the rubbish on my prop. There was a scary moment when we thought a hand was coming up through the water. It was a filled glove!!
In the meantime, Christine's boat had been extricated from the pools but not until she had emptied her water tank and cleared out the front locker to shift the weight from the bow of the boat. See what I mean, you need to be intrepid and NOT to go there without at least one support boat. Three of the boats ended up mooring at Tipton instead of the original destination of Bentley Bridge. Stuart and Marie did go to the latter but they didn't arrive until after 9pm. We all had supper together and recounted our stories and compared our cuts from the wire!
On the Monday we had to cruise for two or three hours longer than the rest of the group to try and catch them up. We did arrive at Pelsall Common but it was a chilly, miserable evening so most boats had battened down the hatches, lit their stoves and stayed in. In the morning I had more stuff around the prop but this could all be removed easily with my specially purchased bread knife. The offensive material was mostly plastic bags but also a school PE bag (no plimsolls inside). I travelled on Christine's boat up to Anglesey basin and back but it hailed (yes, it really did!!) when we got there so didn't get a chance to explore Chasewater. That night was fish and chips at Longwood Junction and five of us had a little ukelele session. There was also a raffle and I won a canal painting by one of the other boaters. Very nice too. We had a talk/musical performance about the BCN canals and their history by Phil Clayton.
The rest of the week went more smoothly and the weather was ok, too. We had a walk/history talk by Andy Tidy, a tour of Bradley lock gate workshop, a barbecue, a weed laden trip along the Walsall canal where I picked up a whole tent on the prop (luckily a bit easier to cut off than the wire had been). I would like to thank Chris for his help getting this off. At the end of the week we were back at Tipton for the canal festival. We had good hot weather so could enjoy the musical offerings and the craft stalls and so on. We had two meals at the Pie Factory - the Henpecked pie was wonderful - and those who had Mick's grill, served on a shovel, seemed to be enjoying it. Christine had two musical friends staying, Rick played banjo and Ellie played fiddle and with the rest of us on ukeleles we had a good session.
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