Mike Stevens' UK Inland Waterways Pages

TRIP REPORTS : THE FELIS CATUS II YEARS

THE BCN MARATHON CHALLENGE 1999

PART 2 — SATURDAY 26 ^th JUNE

Click on a picture to see a bigger version with a caption

The first task was to get all the boats off on schedule at 9 am. There were a number of official start-points for which bonus points were available, and a few boats starting from other places. But all had to be checked by scroots before the start, given their info-packs and started at 0900. I was allocated to the team starting 9 boats from Wolverhampton Top (pictured left), including our one "floating scroot", Brenda Ward's nb Colehurst. I was asked particularly to look out for a chap called Keith Wooten from Central TV who was filming for part or all of the day for a series he was making about the canals. He was due to spend the morning on Elaine Scott's nb Copperkins II (pictured right). I arrived to find one of Elaine's crew on the mobile 'phone to Keith guiding his taxi to the mooring. Very shortly he arrived, and I gave a hand loading all his TV gear onto the boat.

Info-packs given out, boat-names ticked off on the list, watches synchronised (not), and it fell to my lot to wave my hat on the bridge to signal the start. Then it was back to "mission control" (via a sandwich bar to pick up some breakfast) for orders for the rest of the day.

As we had rather fewer vehicles than scroots, we were sent off in teams. I was with Steve Morley in a car driven by Dave (whose surname I didn't discover at the time, simply assuming that he had one, but whom I now know to be Dave Dobbin). That was interesting, as Dave didn't know the area at all. I know the BCN quite well by canal and not at all by road. Steve knows it a bit less then me by water but rather better by road. Finding waterway locations by road in a heavily built-up area is an interesting problem, as no map we've found does justice to both. Steve was working from the GeoProjects BCN map, and I had a newly-bought Birmingham A-Z whose publication date was 1996. That combination should have been fine (as long as Steve and I were working on the same theory of "how to get there from here", which wasn't always the case). But as the main current industry / hobby / whatever of Birmingham and the Black Country seems to be road building, all sorts of unknowns muscled into the equation.

Our first target was to look at the Bradley Branch, where a number of boats, including Copperkins II were due. We had been warned by Helen that competitors' target schedules were probably total fiction by about 0920, so did a bit of bridge-hopping along the Branch. All we found was the floating scroot, nb Colehurst (pictured left) who reported sightings of Copperkins II, Quercus and another boat a bit earlier.

Back to Deepfields Junction, we were just in time to catch a back view of a boat disappearing towards the horizon Birmingham-wards. I thought it looked a bit like Quercus (not heading in the direction I had expected), and this was confirmed by a couple of gongoozlers who were quite interested to hear about the event. Qercus belongs to Pat Perry-Barton, but its crew for this event was led by Kevin Woods, while Pat was crewing with Roger Lane on Onward.

Where next? We consulted our itineraries and found that quite a few boats were due to be heading up the Wyrley & Essington, so we 'phoned back to Mandy to say we'd head in that direction. First we tried looking for them at Wednesfield (from a canal-side pub - who says scrooting has to be hard work?), to no avail. We realised that we had no idea whether we were ahead of or behind the pack, so consulted the itineraries again.

Aha! Quite a few boats were going up the Cannock Extension that afternoon and none of them were due there yet. So we took ourselves off to the Royal Oak at Pelsall Common where we could sit outside in the sun, with a leisurely pint or three and a good lunch, and with Pelsall Junction in clear view. This proved much more profitable and we scored quite a number of scrootings, including nb Quercus, pictured left. (OK, some of them were the same boats twice, going into and later out of the Cannock).

The plan was to be back at base around 1830 or 1900 and go off in a mob for a Balti. This duly happened, but we were without Chris & Helen who had gone back to the TV studio with Keith to film an interview, and also without Ben whose highly individualistic style of scrooting from trains and trams didn't bring him back in time.

Then we planned a mass night-scroot. Two boats, Fulbourne (Martin Ludgate) and Ben (Alison Smedley), both full-length ex-working boats crewed by London WRG teams, were doing things in their own inimitable style. (Yes, there was confusion at times between "Ben the boat" and "Ben the scroot").

The rules of the event limit one to 24 hours cruising within the 30-hour window between the start and finish time. Most boats take the 6 hours compulsory rest-time as a single overnight session for purposes of a bit of kip. But both Ben and Fulbourne planned to have their crew sleep in shifts and to take their 6 hours' rest as a series of shorter pub stops. And both were due at the Dry Dock (a pub not a dock) at Windmill End in the late evening.

By the time we had finished our Balti and the socialising that went with it, we'd missed Ben at the rendezvous and (more seriously) missed the pub. But we did meet up with Fulbourne whose crew felt that 10 scrutineers at once could be classified as excessive. Then back to "mission control", the climbing wall and our sleeping bags.

One of the competing boats was a one-man canoe, Snipe, crewed by two chaps alternating between paddling the canoe and driving the support vehicle. They planned to sleep the night with us as Malthouse Stables, and it was only when we got back there that I discovered that one of them was one of my London IWA friends, Roger Wilkinson.