Kilby Bridge to Birstall, 11.5 miles, 16 locks
Was a bit achy this morning so missed my 9am projected start time and actually set off about 9:30. I think I'd expected there to be other people heading for Leicester today but in fact I've only seen three other narrowboats moving—two coming from Leicester and one that started in Newton Harcourt and caught me up at Freeman's Lock. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
The main memory I have of today is how terrible the locks are on this section of canal. The paddle gear doesn't work well and it is often stiff or completely broken. The gates don't work well and veer between opening by themselves on a whim and needing two people to push them open. The locks leak terribly, which means that you often can't open the bottom gates unless the paddles are up and even then with difficulty. Finally—and this is just my personal opinion rather than the matter of fact of the above—the lock gates are often treacherously thin at the top where you must walk over them. A lot of the time an extra beam has been added at the top, to make it an extra 3-4" wider; sometimes two beams; and one gate even had two railings on it, which felt really safe; but sometimes you find a gate where you're literally walking on the width of the gate itself—perhaps about 6"—and it just feels so dodgy and unsafe.
Apart from the terrible locks, the other main memory I have of today concerns bollards. In no particular order: the weird 'L' shaped bollards that they have here where you can't reliably wrap a rope around because they twist off; the weird pole bollards that they had at one lock, where nothing would stay attached because they had no 'top'; the inconsistency in number and placement of bollards within locks; the omission of bollards just after the bottom gates where you'd tie your stern rope to while you nip back and close the last gate; and finally, the bollards that are completely absent—not just a few missing, but none at all—outside of locks, giving you nothing to tie onto while you try and operate the lock. Oh, and one for Granny Buttons: I saw a single wooden bollard, albeit rounded and tapered at the bottom, that was next to the gates of one lock for no clear reason.
Can I just put in my 2d to complain about lock ladders too. BW are saying that they're putting in extra bollards to stop people mangling the lock ladders; let me tell you that I can see their point!
If you ignored the locks, the bits in between were very good. This part of Leicestershire has some amazing countryside and quite a lot of it is right next to otherwise scummy parts of town. Even Glen Parva—apparently most famous for its young offender centre—was stunning if you go by canal. Once the canal meets the River Soar at King's Lock it gets more interesting and the canal and river swap places a few times as you go through the city, but the vista of Leicester City football ground with a huge weir in front was an unexpected treat. This is Freeman's Lock, where the couple I mentioned earlier caught me up. They'd stayed in Newton Harcourt the night before and stopped at Kilby Bridge to take on water, which just goes to show how much faster you go if there are two of you (see below).
Once you leave Freeman's Lock something wonderful happens: you're still on the canal (the Soar taking a rather low-rent route round the back) but it's river-wide and expansive, and feels exactly like you'd think the River Soar should. This is the bit of canal that was built for flood defence and after the confines of the 'normal' canal, which often has so many reeds growing from the bank that fully half of the navigation is unusable, this was like a breath of fresh air. With no other boats as far as the eye could see, I opened the throttle and let rip. I was loving the space and freedom, and from the way she was handling I could tell Oothoon was too. I'd forgotten until that point, how she'd lapped up the non-tidal Thames last year and it brought back happy memories of our journey back from our enforced stay in Oxford last year.
After the joy that is the 'mile straight' (as the locals call it) the misery of returning to the regular canal is brought home by North Lock. This can only be described as mean spirited and ugly, and it goes out of its way to ruin the joy you've just experienced by having nothing right: the towpath is almost at head height, there are chains along the walls of the approach that scrape your paint or catch on anything that projects, the gates have narrow tops, the far side is barely wide enough to hold the balance beam, the lock gear is stiff and the gates immovable, and it exits under a bridge with a railing preventing access to the towpath until your boat is well out of sight of the lock. I had decided that, for once, I wasn't going to go back and close the bottom gate, figuring that for anyone arriving at the top, the closing of the gate was almost as nothing to everything else that is nasty about this lock, whereas for someone arriving from the bottom, they'd be overjoyed that they didn't need to moor their boat out of sight of the lock while they set it, At the last minute I relented and asked a passing emo if he'd close it for me. As I chugged away, I watched him trying to figure out how to do that (given that pulling on the amazingly stiff balance beam's handle had achieved nothing) and I think he walked off in disgust leaving it open.
After North Lock I was entering familiar territory: this is the bit of towpath I'd walked a couple of times in my recent visits to Leicester and I knew that if there was going to be trouble it'd be at Limekiln Lock, which is the next lock after North. Sure enough I could see people sat in the seats next to the lock and as soon as I got near, one of them was up and by the boat, telling me to throw them a 'lock key' and they'd sort everything out. This was Wes, apparently from Leicester but brought up in Bolton (or something) who was in his thirties or forties, slightly tipsy, and who claimed to be a water gypsy and a well-travelled-by-canal 'water rat'. When I approached the lock with my windlass (which is what a 'lock key' is actually called), he took it and offered to show me how to do the paddles the water gypsy way. This, I was bemused to find, involved unlatching the pawl that normally stops the rack and pinion of the paddle arm from falling back, then turning the windlass the wrong way. His lady companion had joined him at this point, asking all manner of awkward questions and in the end I said I preferred my own technique and took over from him. I've no idea whether he really was a water gypsy or had any actual experience on all the canals he name-dropped to know whether he was a water rat (aren't they something to do with the theatre?) but he satisfied my dread that I'd run into a n'er-do-well in an entertaining and charming way. By the way Wes, if you're reading, I took your advice about The Plough only to find that it was closed because it's gone bankrupt—perhaps selling beer so cheaply wasn't such a good idea after all—and you were right about The Mulberry too: expensive; plus they'd stopped serving food by the time I got there.
Dinner was the leftovers of last night's lasagne, but not before I had to change the gas. To do this I put on the navigation light at the front of the boat and nearly blinded two lads in a fibreglass cruiser who were trying to find a mooring. I could hear all this shouting but didn't know where it was coming from until I switched the light off. I'm now officially running on Herr Aldi's fridge, so expect flat batteries all round tomorrow morning.
One final thing: yesterday I set off from Harborough at 11am and arrived at Kilby Bridge at 9:30pm (albeit with a delay for a dunking and a stop for a spot of lunch); today I left Kilby at 9:30am and finally moored at 8pm (thanks to a flask of tea and some sandwiches so I didn't need to stop). These long days are clearly not sustainable and are also inconsistent with the timings that Canalplan AC is giving me, so today I've timed myself doing locks. Under ideal conditions—that is to say a lock with a good approach, good exit, good gear, good gates and which is already full—I can do it in 21 minutes, starting as I approach the landing bollards and finishing as I start to leave the lock behind. If the paddles, gates, approach or exit are rubbish, but the lock needs no filling, I can be through in 25 minutes. If the lock is 'wrong' and needs filling too, you're talking 30-35 minutes. On that basis, it's actually quite impressive that I've done as well as I have, but I'm guessing this will drastically alter the timings for my journey to Llangollen and not in a good way.
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