Wet, wet and more wet.

Not quite the weather we were hoping for but we decided to set off anyway. Mid-morning we fuelled up and headed West even though the skies were decidedly grey but with the odd patch of blue.

Our plan was to travel along the Birmingham Level Main Line canal and head towards Dudley and Stourbridge, and onwards over the next couple of weeks or so. We passed through an area of heavy industry linked by this canal and constructed with the help of Thomas Telford, a leading industrial architect of the time. The original canal zig-zagged its way for 22.5 miles connecting all these industries, as this was the main transport system then. The old canal is still passable in many places but it was too slow and twisty and had locks so Telford was commissioned to straighten it and he created a shorter route of 15 miles without any locks at all. This was commercially much more efficient but had toll islands built in the centre so that the barges had to stop and pay to carry their goods by weight and content.

 A Toll Island

I can tell you the space each side is very tight and there are quite a few of them.

All was going well, apart from a couple of heavy downpours, not a problem to us of course, being the hardy boaters that we are, until we reached the outskirts of Dudley at Blowers Green and entered our first and only lock of the day. Disaster! It was locked. "It's a lock", I hear you say. Well yes, but they aren't usually locked. We discovered that all the locks in this area have 'anti-vandal' locks on them and need a special key. Did we have one? Did anyone tell us we needed one? Did our Waterways Bible inform us we needed one? 

Thanks to only the second boat we had seen on the move all day that had been following us for a couple of miles, we were able to get through the lock as he had the right key. However we are about to face 24 locks tomorrow without that special key. Might be a problem.

Come back and see how we got on.

By the way, we had a passenger today.