Our Saturday overnight mooring with towpath lighting and CCTV security was not far from te top of the Delph 9, so Pat went on ahead. The only problem was that she had forgotten the handcuff key necessary to work the paddles. To her annoyance, all bar one of the bottom gates were open and paddles sill raised in many cases. So our progress was slow - 1 hour instead of the 30 minutes last year. Reaching the Stourbridge 16 the plan was for me to work the locks whilst Pat went ahead preparing the next and helping with gate closures as appropriate. In many of the locks it was possible to close the offside half gate by pulling from within the lock, then getting off to close the other, thus avoiding a potentially hazardous lock jump, or a lengthy walk round. All went well until lock 12. Here the boat grounded in the lock due to a low pound and I had to phone Pat to return to open a ground paddle to flush me out. However, the boat fared no better in the pound itself bumping along on the bottom in tickover until finally grounding firmly on some underwater reef. A call to BW was not particularly helpful as by the time the on call engineer replied jiggery pokery with the pole had swivelled the boat off its pivot and enabled me to push in on over. We were able to get to the next lock and carry on. So far we had seen no other boats moving and it was only on the way to the last 4 Stourton Locks that we passed a plastic boat, and then in the locks, another three. The Staffs & Worcs was much more busy but with no hold-ups we arrived at Kinver at 14:45. Tomorrow we should be in Stourport and will be able to assess the River Severn first hand.
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