I’d rather not be writing this post, we’re still feeling traumatised, but here goes…..
On our way up the flight, we crossed a boat coming down. I asked if they knew the Wyrley and Essington canal, “we’ve just come off there, there’s a great mooring at Bently Park about half an hour from the junction.”
We could have stopped at the mooring right at the top of the flight, but it’s accompained by the dulcet tones of canada geese and the emergency services sounding their sirens through a major city centre road junction. It was only 3pm so we decided to keep going. It didn’t take long for the doubts to arise.
Graffiti is always a dubious sign. And sure enough, a few hundred yards onto the W&E we ground to a halt and Eric had to decend down the weed hatch
It took us 90 minutes to reach Bentley Park, which turns out to be retail/entertainment hub, with a short arm and mooring rings. We were right next to a GreenKing carvery, so we could have eaten out, but I’d had the foresight to prep a casserole in the Mr D thermal cooker and neither of us had the wherewithall to walk another few steps off the boat.
Needless to say we slept well and decided to enjoy the location, taking advantage of our senior years for a cheap daytime game of 10 pin bowling, I let Eric win.
Cineworld was only showing films we hadn’t heard of, and I dont qualify for silver surfer rates yet, so we gave that a miss. We stocked up the fridge at Sainsburys and Aldi, before finally treating ourselves to dinner at Wagamama. Considering we were moored next to a pub, multiple drive thrus and a huge car park, we wondered if it would be noisy overnight but apart from someone burning rubber doing donuts at 6am it was quite peaceful and our info about it being a good mooring was spot on.
Up early and refreshed after some R&R, we debated our route. Google images suggested a fair amount of greenery and suburbia between here and us rejoining the Birmingham and Fazeley canal in 27 miles. But if it were really bad we could turn off onto the Walsall canal in 7 miles and come through the centre of Birmingham instead, and besides it was only 3 miles to the next winding hole…..such a good plan….
After 3/4 mile in 2 hours, we decided enough was enough, it was only 2 more miles to the winding hole.
How many photos would you like to see of Eric descending into hell? I have run out of storage space for them all. It took us another 3 hours to reach the winding hole, and all the time we were fearful it would be too shallow for us to actually use.
Thankfully it only took us half an hour and a lot of polling to make it round the 180°, and we limped slowly back to Bentley Park. We had taken 7 hours to do 6 miles. Ironically it is actually quite a pretty canal.
but it is shallow, and as we could see from the rust markings on the armco, the water level is still about 6 inches low.
This is compounded by the amount of vegetation, silt and debris along both the towpath and offside, that make it impossible to moor. Despite it being quite a wide canal, the cruising channel down the middle was only wide enough for a single boat, so we are incredibly glad we didn’t meet anyone travelling towards us. Being an electric boat means we naturally have a very slow turning prop and we can go months without picking up any debris, just today
And unusually the water is crystal clear, meaning that not only could we see all the weed, shopping trollys, urban jellyfish etc, we could also see the fish. And the fish were huge. We saw several 2 foot long pike, huge carp, rudd and perch. Which admittedly was a bit of a treat, no wonder we also saw lots of kingfishers.
Whether or not we chickened out too soon, or was our research inadequate, the combination of the mat weed, shallowness, low water levels, detritius, general lack of maintenance overgrown vegetation and infrequent use of the canal, our adventure onto pastures new was to be a very short lived adventure.
