Mike Stevens' UK Inland Waterways Pages

TRIP REPORTS : THE FELIS CATUS II YEARS

BCN MARATHON 1998

In a previous story I wrote about our participation in the BCN Marathon Challenge in 1996. In 1998 we decided to give it another go, but only just got to Birmingham in time. Click here for some information about the boat, and here for the story of our run up to Birmingham.

Two weeks after getting the boat to Brum, we were back for the Marathon. Our "Third Hand", Ben Scott, had called in on the boat during the intervening time to deliver a quantity of good Black Country beer (Holden's) to see us through the weekend. Wendy and I arrived early Friday evening, shopped and moved the boat round through Worcester Bar, winded at Salvage Turn and moored near Holliday Street aqueduct. We were due to start from Gas Street Basin at 9 am next day. Ben arrived later in the evening while I was chatting with some other competitors, Bruce & Glen Peckett whom I'd only previously known digitally on the canals mailing list on the Internet.

Next morning we went round the corner to take on water at Cambrian Wharf, then back to Gas Street for the official start. We were about the third boat through Worcester Bar after the 9 am kick-off, the procession being led by my digital friends on nb Badger, singing that well known BCN ditty "Miles and miles of poly round the blade".

In 1996 we had concentrated on the Southern half of the BCN, mainly because we saw that as scoring quite a lot of points without too many locks. This year we wanted to concentrate on the Northern half, which meant a lot more locks, but potentially even more points. We had set a circular course, which didn't give us the option of cutting many bits out if we were running late.

From Gas Street we ran straight to Smethwick where we went up the locks in a procession. At the front were our friends on Badger, followed by a chap (whom we later got to know as Peter Tyrer) single-handing an ex-Anglo-Welsh hire-boat called Taunton. Single-handing the Marathon is a pretty brave thing to do! Then came us, followed by a day-boat from Sherborne Wharf that wasn't taking part in the Marathon but going to the Black Country Museum. At the top of the locks, we ate brunch on the move, before descending Spon Lane locks, once again behind Taunton until he decided to let us past. At this point we crossed the cruiser Tango coming from one of the Marathon's other starting-points.

Back on the Main Line, we had a quick run to Pudding Lane where we turned into the Wednesbury Old Canal and followed it to where it was cut off a few years ago by the new Black Country Spine Road, just about at the point where it became the Ridgeacre Branch. This was our first visit to the dead end since the building work there had been finished and we were pleased to see that in place of the heap of gravel that had marked the end of the canal last time, the terminus is now hard-edged and has a proper winding-hole. There is a pub there now, called The Ridgeacre, but we didn't try it because (a) it's across the very busy road and (b) we couldn't afford the time – on the Marathon one is allowed 6 hours rest time (less than the last time we entered), and we wanted to take that in one go overnight.

Then we retraced our steps to Ryder's Green junction and turned into the Walsall Canal. Our previous experiences of the Walsall had been of considerable difficulty, with shallows, rubbish and empty pounds in the Ryders' Green flight. Would the 1997 Clean-Up Weekend there have made any lasting difference? The answer was a resounding yes. We went right through the whole length of the Walsall, and the Walsall Locks Branch at the other end, without a single spot of bother. What a change!

We took the arm to Walsall Town Wharf to pick up the bonus points on offer. Some of the building work we saw going on there in 1996 was finished, including a pleasant-looking café, and a good re-build of the original wharf building. But there was also some new building going on that proclaimed itself as an art gallery. On our way up Walsall Locks we met our first scrutineer since the start, shortly followed by Chris & Helen Davey, main organisers of the event, who had sent themselves the personal target of sighting every competing boat (all 31 of them). There were a few boats they had lost touch with, and we were able to tell them of our sightings of Taunton and Tango.

As we approached Birchills Junction we met another competitor, nb Maple (from Middlewich), heading in the opposite direction. We turned right on the Wyrley & Essington and crossed paths with quite a few other competitors, including a covey of about eight Wilderness Boats. These highly-maneuverable small craft always add an air of jollity to the Marathon with their twirls and twiddles at junctions. [Click here to visit their club web site.] Another competitor we sighted at this stage was Pat Perry-Barton on nb Quercus, known to us as a regular attender and helper at Canalway Cavalcade in London each May.

Free from locks for the rest of the day, we decided it was time for a meal on the move. At Pelsall Junction we turned up the dead-end Cannock Extension Canal. At the top, we backed down as far as the wider bit opposite the dry-dock, where there was a notice asking people not to wind there under power as it silts the dock entrance, so I decided to take advantage of the excellent depth here, and Felis Catus II's good handling in reverse, and continue backwards until the next feasible winding spot. One of the permanent moorers there pointed out such a spot to me that I might well not have noticed without his help.

Re-joining the Wyrley, we went on to Ogley Junction where it comes to an end (for now – best wishes for the Lichfield & Hatherton restoration project) and turned into the Anglesey Branch to Anglesey Basin. Our original plan had been to moor here at about 9:30 pm and restart at 3:30 am, but a look at sunrise & sunset times indicated that a later stop-and-start would make better use of daylight. And we were actually here ahead of schedule: only just after 9 pm. So we decided to go on until 10 pm and to reward ourselves by extending the rest break to six-and-a-half hours. By 10 pm we had got back to the Wyrley, retraced our steps to Catshill Junction, turned into the Daw End Branch and moored just past the junction, still in daylight and very pleased with our day's run.

The spirit may have been willing but middle-aged flesh tends to be on the weak side, and our rest-period extended itself to 7 hours, with our re-start at 04:58. The Daw End proved fairly shallow and slow, so we were now dropping behind schedule. We hoped to make up some time down Rushall locks (the top lock was Ben's 6,000^th in his boating career), but found ourselves following nb Vimy, also a Marathon competitor, who was slowed by an empty pound near the bottom of the flight. For quite a lot of the second day we were also slowed by the presence of quite a few anglers (much friendlier in the Midlands than near London, we notice).

At Rushall Junction we turned left on the Tame Valley Canal, where again we ran in problems on the Perry Barr flight. As we reached to top lock we met a lock-wheeler from nb Maple who was coming up the locks and having to re-fill several pounds. Before long a cheerful lock-keeper was working with the crews of both boats to get the levels right and the traffic moving. He said he was glad to see us all, as the more boats use his locks, the more chance there is that BW will spend some money improving them. And they certainly needed some work done on them, which I hear has now happened. Quite a few of the paddle-racks slipped. The ground-paddle gear is mounted on steel sheets covering the paddle-well. Sometimes our attempts to wind a paddle merely resulted in lifting this steel sheet an inch or two in the air and pivoting it out of place, after which nothing happened. Having watched how the lock-keeper put this right when it happened, and discovered that my weight on the steel sheet stopped it happening in the first place, we got down the flight, but very slowly.

In lock 10 there was a large sheet of polythene floating which I thought I'd avoided getting round the blade. Wrong! So as we came out of the lock I had little control of the boat and certainly not enough power to back off when she grounded on a mud-bank. So it was time to get out the long pole, push the boat back into the channel and limp into lock 11, where Wendy made our only visit of the weekend to our weed-hatch.

Just as we left lock 11 we had a call on the mobile from Brian Dominic, one of the scrutineers and another Internet friend from the canals mailing list, who arranged to see us at lock 12. This he duly did, wound a few paddles for us at locks 12 & 13, took a photo, 'phoned control to report progress and was sent off on his next task.

At the stage when we had been ahead of schedule we'd worked out an alternative plan "Divert round Digbeth" (how about that for a film title?). This would take an extra one-and-a-quarter hours and score us an extra 22 points, which is not as many as we would forfeit if, as a result we failed to get back to Gas Street by the appointed hour of 3 pm. But by the time we reached Salford Junction we were already well behind schedule and our only thought was how much time we could save by efficient lock-working up Aston and Farmers' Bridge locks (24 in all) and how close to Gas Street we would be before we ran out of time.

Aston started well : we had a good road, but a low pound two down from the top cost us some of the time we'd saved. At Farmer's Bridge there were some boats ahead of us who had come round Digbeth. The one immediately in front was lifting bottom paddles for us to save time. Nevertheless we were only three locks up the flight when the clocks struck three, and we arrived back at Gas Street at 16:08, and moored where we'd started the day for some socialising with other competitors before taking the boat back to Sherborne Wharf for our next trip. We moored at Sherborne Street at 19:40 and staggered rapidly off to the station.

All in all we were pleased with the weekend, if distinctly exhausted. We'd fulfilled our original cruising plan, even if not all within the allotted time. If the judges agreed with my analysis (and were happy with the 'photos I was to present as evidence of the dead-ends and junctions we visited), then we should have scored about 380 points, compared with 260 or so in 1996, which, we thought had a chance of putting us in a respectable placing. As it happened everybody seemed to score more than previously, and we remained about the middle of the league. We had hoped to compete in the next Marathon Challenge in 1999, probably in company with another boat from the Hillingdon Canal Club where we moor, but circumstances prevented that, and I took part as a scrutineer instead. Read my account here. In 2000 I comperted again, as navigator on Jeff Dennison's boat Coronation. Read that story here.