Mike Stevens' UK Inland Waterways Pages

TRIP REPORTS : THE FELIS CATUS II YEARS

THE BCN MARATHON CHALLENGE 1999

A SCROOT'S-EYE VIEW

PART 1 — INTRODUCTION

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The BCN 24-hour Marathon Challenge, for those of you who haven't come across it before, is an annual event held (surprise!) on the BCN, the canals of Birmingham & ther Black Country, over the last weekend in June each year. It aims to get as many boats as care to participate whizzing round all the little-used bits of the BCN in a way that gets their travels recorded for posterity. It takes the slogan "use 'em or loose 'em" one stage further in that the campaign value of "using 'em" only exists if somebody knows you've done it. So it sets out a scoring system - so many points per lock or mile, depending on how rarely used the particular stretch is reckoned to be. There are bonus points for dead ends etc. Each boat sets its own itinerary and has to submit a log with evidence of where it's been, and quite a long time afterwards the organisers, Chris and Helen Davey of the Inland Waterways Association & Waterway Recorvery Group, having examined the logs in excruciating detail, announce who's scored what and who's the winner.

WHY I WAS THERE

Wendy and I competed in the Marathon in Felis Catus II in 1996 and again in 1998, with an extra crew member each time. More recently, I crewed on Jeff Dennison's boat Coronation in 2000.

In 1999 we had planned to compete again, and Ben Scott, our 1998 crewman, was signed up to be with us again. Then, sadly, Wendy needed an eye operation with quite a long recovery period, so we didn't have the chance for the amount of boating needed to get FC2 to Birmingham by the due date. So Ben and I offered our services as scrutineers for the event. Or, as the team jargon has it, as "scroots".

FRIDAY 25^th JUNE

I travelled up on Friday evening by rail. "Mission Control" was at the Malthouse Stables in Tipton (pictured left). By the time I'd actually got away from home, I reached Brum by a train that would have given me nearly an hour's wait for a local connection to Tipton, so (once I'd bought an up-to-date Birmingham A-Z at the station) it was into a taxi and off to Tipton, arriving at exactly the moment that Ben walked through the gate, having spent 2 days travelling from London via local trains on a devious route via Salisbury and Lydney!

We met the rest of the crew, led by Chris and Helen, together with Mandy Morley whose task was manning the 'phones at Mission Control for the weekend. When I say "met", I mean "met over a period of time", as we had arrived from all over the country. Chris and Helen were travelling from Sussex and arrived quite late, only just after Mandy and Steve Morley, who had been deputed to find a boat called Audlem which Canal Boat magazine had blagged from Anglo-Welsh for the weekend. It was supposed to be at Gas Street, but it wasn't. But they did find a boat called Callisto from Anglo-Welsh with Canal Boat posters all over it, but with nobody on board (all in the pub).

Anyway, eventually we were all there, and were briefed for the event, issued with our lists of competitors and their hoped-for itineraries and our "scrooting sheets".

And so to bed, in our sleeping bags. Malthouse Stables is a community base for various leisure activities, and we were sleeping in the main activities room. It's the first time I've slept with a climbing wall looming over me and archery targets at one end of the room. The chorus of snores was wondrous to hear (I'm sure I must have contributed), and could almost understand why one of our number chose to pitch his sleeping bag in the showers downstairs to get away from the row.