Reluctantly, back to the marina

Tuesday 29^th September; Oddingley to marina

What a beautiful and peaceful mooring this is.  The railway is no bother and the motorway quite distant.  With no trees to shade us, we had sun till early evening last night and early this morning – at this time of year, what’s not to like about that?  Dave wanted to get on with painting, so Meg and I went off for a walk.  First we went over the level crossing, down the hill to join a footpath and up again to the wood at the top of the hill.  What a fab view, and just look at that blue sky!

The motorway was away in another direction, but I could see Chuffed in the distance down beyond the level crossing so zoomed in for the photo. 

We walked along the edge of the wood.  With no stock in the fields Meg could be off the lead and trotting about, although as they were obviously pasture fields (dry sheep poo and cow pats the evidence) I did pick up after her.  The footpath took us downhill and into the woods.

So far, so easy to follow.  The steep path led back down to the railway, which we crossed into a field close to the road through Dunhampstead.  I was following Nicholson’s, which unfortunately has the bridge number 30 printed where the path splits part way across the field to take you down to Lake Bridge (no 29).  That was where I wanted to cross the canal and walk to Oddingley.  But the footpath signs are small and only on the gates and stiles so I missed the split and ended up on the road, discovering too late that there is no access to Lake Bridge from the canal.  Never mind, it was a lovely walk back by the water.  Dunhampstead moorings were still chilly in the shade so I was glad we had stopped where we did.  Dave was going great guns with painting back at the boat.

Work time for me too, so I cleaned out some more cupboards and after lunch got on with scraping the rusty patches in the well-deck for Dave to treat with Vactan and red-ox.

By mid-afternoon the cloud was coming over, but we’d had a very productive day.  The forecast for the next few days is poor, and not wanting to return to the marina in wind and rain we set off, somewhat reluctantly, at about 4.30.  First we passed the Forge Studio, which a walker had told us serves excellent coffee and teacakes as well as painted canal-ware.

The reed-cutters had been this way, as piles of cut reeds dumped on the offside showed.

In some places you would hardly know they had been there ….

but in others there was now room to pass another boat quite easily – Dave moved over to the left here and it shows the space better.

At Hanbury Locks we found a single-hander just starting down, and as the volunteers had long gone I gave him a hand.  He was only going into the marina for a self pumpout before returning to his mooring on the main line, so as dusk was beginning to fall we were happy to leave the bottom gates open for him.

3 miles, 3 locks.

On the Wednesday we cleaned through the boat, which took ages as we had done very little during the trip. It was raining on and off as we packed the car and was really bad for the journey home.  But we’d had an excellent trip, even though we’d needed to abandon our original intention.  The plan had been to go up the Severn to Stourport, then turn off the Staffs and Worcester at Stourton Junction to return via Windmill End and the Netherton tunnel, but with my injured tummy muscles that would have been far too many locks to cope with.  But it all turned out for the best – we had mostly good weather and plenty of time for changing the oil, de-rusting, painting and clearing out before winter.

 

Trip stats

Waterways – Droitwich Junction canal, Worcester and Birmingham canal, River Severn.

About 28 miles in all, and 42 locks;  20 miles, 7¾ furlongs of narrow canals; 2¼ furlongs of broad canals;  38 narrow locks; 4 broad locks. The river mileage was about 6½ miles.

So compared with our normal trips lasting 2 weeks, the mileage and locks were very few, but we did get a lot of maintenance done.