In a bit of a jam.

Another quiet night only broken for me, not Helen, by the call of local owls a couple of times. Mind you we did have a walk into the town to post some letters but decided to find the Royal Exchange, another Bathams pub that he had frequented previously. Just as i bought the drinks No.1 daughter called on the phone so Helen disappeared to talk to her. We were going to have a pint andf then back to hear what happened in the Archer's. She was so long I managed to squeeze in two pints of bitter and a bag of scratchings before she got back!

The end of the arm has changed for the better since we were last here. The industrial premises that was next to Joyners wharf. The area is to undergo further beautification as the area has been adopted by the local business. This was the site of the Stourbridge Iron Works that built the Stourbridge Lion, (first steam engine to run on rails in the USA, Unfortunately the rails were wooden so it was not a great success but the Lion is in the Smithsonian museum. It was interesting to hear that 5 engines were sent but the Lion was the only one that made it. The other 4 were lost in the Great Lakes!) I love the fact that the side of the jetty is made up of interlocking iron billets, like a jigsaw.

The canal seems quite deep enough until you get to Coalbourn Brook Brtidge were it definitely shallows and the channel gets restricted as above.

I had just joked with Helen that when we got to Wordsley Junction there would be a boat club waiting to go up! Not quite like that but there was a boat coming down that had spent the night in the pound above the bottom lock. We therefore inherited 'John' who is a one of that band of brothers who enjoy the canals and lock working so much they volunteer their services on a ad hoc basis, not connected to C&RT. Here we are at the bottom lock. I would like to think they were discussing tactics, but almost certainly not.

It was here at Lock 13 that we asked some workers that were building the repro. warehouse a[partments if they had an old scaffolding board we could have. They duly obliged and it is now out short plank! I love the way the new buildings have been built to copy the original, and the fact that the bywash/weir actually runs under the old warehouse.

If this flight od locks were just about anywhere else it would be teeming with gongoozlers as it is a lovely flight with plenty to see and history oozing out of every pound. Above Lock 4 is the Red House Cone that was built around 1790. It is one of only four left in the UK, and the only one that has a lehr that allows the glass to cool more slowly so preventing stresses with in it. It had been the main site for Stuart Crystal until 2009 but is now a Dudley Council Museum. Fancy one of only four in the country when the are around here would have had loads of them.

Dadford's Shed is a timber and slate building that was once a transhipment warehouse. Dadford was the engineer for building the Stourbridge Canal. There are craftsmen boat builders using the facility now. What a picture it makes as it seems to take you back about 200 years, with the glass cone in the distance.

By Dadford's Shed is this little group of buildings. The Dock Offlicence must have been a pub at one time. I'm not sure if the little bridge was to accommodate a working arm of just give access for a side pound to store water. Industry was so dense in the are that maybe it served both purposes. There were several coal pits in the area.

The next lock is called the staircae, but in fact it is more like Bratch Locks where there is a very short pound between the two locks. You can see in the photo just how little room there is before the next lock.

Looking back down from the 'Staircase lock to see Dadford's Shed and the Red House Cone things were going swimmingly. I had jsut said to the lock workers that we would stop at lock 8 for refreshments as it was a hot day. We arrived at the lock after just an hour from the first lock!

Oh dear. As we entered the lock we took a port list and stuck fast! I initially thought that we had grounded on something on the bottom of the canal, but after a look around I saw the culprit was a short log that was exactly the size to jam inbetween us and the lock side, and it was solid! We tried the reverse, we tried flushing the boat out, and in the picture you can see me resorting to trying a Spanish windlass to try and winch the log out!

No luck, so as I resorted to hacking and chopping at it we called the cavalry out, C&RT. By the time they arrived, only about 25 minutes, about the same time it took us to get through to a person on the telephone on the 0303 040 4040 number!! I had just about got half way through the log by then.

He said that he had no equipment with him so if giving it another flush through didn't work he would have to be back off to get some gear. I went aft to put go astern and took John back with me for a bit of ballast. Helen and Kevin (C&RT) went to open the paddles to flush us out. After a couple of times nothing seemed to move. Kevin told Helen that he would give it a couple more times and then give it up for a bad job. The next time something moved but we were still stuck. The last chance time there was a crack and we moved back astern. We were free. When we recovered the log I had got half way through it, and that was just enough to allow it to crack and make a bit of room. You can see the crack that allowed us out of the predicament. We were delayed about an hour and 20 minuets.