Days with great contrasts. Day 5 saw us approaching Birmingham outskirts, weather was horrid, really quite wet and cold. fortunately only a few locks but those were troublesome. There really was no one else around we only saw one other boat moving all day. As we only ran for a few hours and the weather was so bad we had to use the generator on the boat for the first time as batteries were not being charged enough by the solar panels. Day 6 saw us running into Birmingham; not the prettiest route and again the weather was pretty dismal. However surprising amount of wildlife including a kingfisher doing the catching a fish and beating it on a branch which cheered J up no end. Canals very shallow in places and plenty of debris in the canal meant having to clear the prop frequently. Again really quiet on the canal, saw one boat moored near the bottom of the big flight of locks (Farmer’s Bridge) going in to the centre of Birmingham, which must have later cursed us as we went up the flight ahead of them, we struck really lucky as the locks were all set for us and all but two the had the lower gates open so we went up really quickly; we should have got payment from Birmingham tourism / CRT as we were photographed / films at least seven times and J explained the workings of a lock three times on the way up. Stopped opposite the Barclaycard Arena, surprising quiet, especially compared to the Gas Street Basin / Worchester Bar area just a few hundred metres away.

A bit of a lie in the next day, in retrospect a mistake as the day turned out to be quite tough. There are two parallel “mainlines” going through Birmingham, the old and the new. We tried to go up to the old line at the first opportunity but the second pound between the locks had been completely drained so we reversed back to the new line and moved further along before going up Spon locks. Again a surprising amount of wildlife, including a lot coots on nests. Really cold. The end of the day saw us at the top of Wolverhampton flight having gone down a couple of locks then reversing back again on the advice of a local boater. Noisy mooring.

Day 8 was a real contrast, going down Wolverhampton flight takes you down 21 locks over two miles but the contrast between top and bottom is enormous, from urban (think major road junction and railway station) to totally rural. Again really quiet on the flight (only 2 other boats seen). One of the pounds about halfway down had been drained overnight but had been fixed by CRT by the time we got there. We moved onto the Shropshire union canal via the Staffs and Worcs and saw more boats in the first hour than we have so far on the whole trip. Moored overnight at Brewood, which turned out to be really nice with some interesting architecture. Really quiet mooring, such a contrast to the previous night. After so many cold and wet days we are really suffering from hat hair!

Day 9 dawned really bright and sunny which made things feel really much better. A cross wind later in the day became a real problem in places, particularly following another boat which was travelling so slowly past moored bats that we had to shut off the power to stop from catching them completely but that then leaves us with no steering which isn’t good when being pushed towards the moored boats. A long cruise today allowed us to catch up on domestic items and we bought a cross body windlass holder which should make crossing lock gates safer, we shall see.