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#canal

3 posts3 participants0 posts today
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Bobbing Boat

Some canals have single locks, in pairs. This design offers a chance to chat with other boaters, since 2 boats can go up, or down, at the same time.

Chatting with another boat, I see and hear: she recovered from a stroke, hobbles, struggles to wind up the paddles; he recently fell and injured something unspecified.

Later, they moor their neatly kept boat nearby. As I help them tie up, I can see … this season may be their last.

#age#aging#fitness
Public
Bobbing Boat

This bast*rd bird bit me.

This swan was too dumb to figure out to chase sinking seed, so I leaned out the swan doors with a palmful of delicious birdseed in my flat, outstretched hand. Usually swans will feed this way before they learn to chase the sinking seed. This one decided to bite me.

It didn't break the skin, but nearly abraded the skin off my index finger.

I guess that makes me the stupid one.

A swan and three goslings in a canal, outside a narrowboat's swan doors. The water is murky with dappled sunlight. There's a bit of green vegetation in the photo, from the bank.
#CanalLife#canal#boating
Public
Bobbing Boat

In a crack in the oak beam of a lock gate, bees 🐝 built a hive.

[Note that when lock gates open and close, they often thump against the stone lock chamber.]

Thump! Out come the bees! 🐝

🐝 And there I was, standing on the stern, surrounded by 🐝 bees, trying to convince myself it's OK, it's just 🐝bees looking around.

Closed the gate gently, emptied the lock, opened the gate at the lower end, and got the boat clear! 🐝

#CanalLife#canal#lock
Public
Bobbing Boat

While driving a mooring pin into the ground, the mallet's head separated from the handle. This bank is quite hard — no chance of pounding in a pin just by holding the head in my hand. Those would be love taps.

When I went to a nearby boat to ask to borrow their mallet, I noticed they were tied to rings, with more rings ahead of them.

So I moved the boat up to the rings, of course.

But I do need a new mallet.

#CanalLife#canal#mooring
Public
Bobbing Boat

Beauty and calm, so close to Birmingham, the UK's 2nd-largest city.

Some historic bridges over the BCN Wyrley & Essington canal are cast iron. Like old bridges over most UK canals, the iron parts are painted black and white, the brick is unpainted.

It's jarring to see several Cannock Extension canal bridges tagged with a new, bright blue, Canal & River Trust sign. The image description (ALT text) describes original signage.

A steel-arched canal bridge that is level on top, and has a brick parapet (the sides, like railings, but formed of a brick wall). The brick has some decorative detail, where bricklayers showed their skill. In the photo, a narrowboat is passing under the bridge, and the photo was taken looking forward ober its roof. The bridge's signage, facing all boats passing below, dates back to Britain's industrial revolution. The largest sign reads: "Horseley Coal & Iron Company 1824" as black letters spaced across several meters of the white arch. A second sign reads: "Persall Works Bridge" and this sign resembles the signage on all bridges in this area, which are named, not numbered. There's a third sign that reads: "Site of Pelsall Iron Co. 1832 - 1892. Presented for the millennium, 994 - 1994". (Those last digits are very small and I may have misread them.)
#CanalLife#canal#bridge
Public
George

"On 11 September 1883, Van Gogh boarded the train from The Hague to Drenthe. He spent three months in Hoogeveen and Nieuw-Amsterdam/Veenoord and made a day trip to the artists' village of Zweeloo. In Drenthe, Van Gogh found a vast and dark, but wonderful landscape that stayed with him."
#vangogh #drenthe #canal #turf #peat

Painting by V. van Gogh. "Van Gogh makes The Peat Barge quickly, with a broad brush and a palette knife. He does not wait for the paint to dry. First he paints the cream-coloured underlay. Then the figures follow. Then the land with the peat heaps and the sod hut. Then the water and the flatboat, on which there is a folded sail to cover the peat. The sky comes last."
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Bobbing Boat

Tunnels are long, narrow, cold, drippy, and dark.

1½ miles (2½ km) of tunnel takes a half hour at 3 miles per hour (5 kmh). That's a long time of keeping the boat pointed down the middle, avoiding the tunnel walls. Occasionally you peer back and peer forward; is the light at the end of the tunnel larger then the one behind, yet? This photo is about ⅔ through, with 15 minutes remaining to reach the end. It's so hard to judge distances.

A narrowboat in a dark canal tunnel, which has a circular cross-section over the water, walls and curved "ceiling", the lower half filled with water. A light on the bow illuminates a small section ahead, an arc of light on tunnel walls and ceiling. In the distance is the end of the tunnel, a speck of daylight the size of a coin when held at arm's length. Lights inside the boat also illuminate the tunnel walls, but faintly, as rectangular projections of the window openings in either side of the steel narrowboat. On the roof of the boat there's some equipment, unrecognisable in the dark: a barge pole (the proverbial "ten-foot pole"), a hook, a plank, and two solar panels.
#CanalLife#canal#tunnel
Public
Bobbing Boat

Unseen by me, two geese🪿 slipped into the lock ahead of my big, 17-tonne boat.

Halfway through filling the lock, there's a honk🪿 from below. The geese had swum between the steel boat and the brick wall of the lock chamber. The boat is 6½ feet wide (1.95m), the lock 7 feet (2.15m). Not a lot to spare.

I had to hold the boat away from the wall while herding the geese back to the open space ahead of the bow.

#CanalLife#canal#boating
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Bobbing Boat

In the olden, golden days of yore, when horses pulled boats along the canals, speed was of the essence.

The faster you could go, the sooner you could get your next load, the more money you could earn.

Wherever there was a bridge the horse couldn't go under, it would have to be unhitched, walked around, and rehitched – time consuming!
Any small bridges had a slot for the tow rope to pass through. (See photo.)

A footbridge over a lock, used by lock operators to get from the gate and paddles on one side pf the lock to the gate and paddles on the other side of the lock. The bridge and its railing are painted on traditional British Waterways black and white.
#CanalLife#canal#tow
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Bobbing Boat

I saw a duck with ducklings 4 days ago. Only 5 ducklings, so some had already become snacks. 😮

I fed them mixed birdseed, which sinks. Only the duck could eat its fill. The ducklings, still so tiny, did their best. One stuck its head under to chase a seed. Very cute. Wish I had pics but I was busy parcelling out seed.

And 3 days ago we moored across from a nesting swan. Beak tucked under a wing the whole day. I fed its mate.

#CanalLife#canal#wildlife
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