Heading For The Homestead

After the wide open spaces of the river Avon, David Johns returns to more familiar (and narrower!) territory.

Spoiled. That’s what I’d been. Utterly spoiled. And by what? One word: width. Oh, and another one: height. Actually, now I think of it, all three dimensions.

That’s rivers for you. Seven days chugging serenely up Shakespeare’s Avon with a further couple of days before that down the Severn and I’d become accustomed to channels so vast that you could couldn’t see from one side to the other! (I may be exaggerating slightly)

It certainly felt like that once I’d gone back onto the canal at Stratford, specifically when I moved off the mooring to exit the basin and head North. If you haven’t done it before then be aware that there’s a very low road bridge overhead with the passage just wide enough for one narrowbeam craft.

After my river travels this suddenly felt weirdly cramped. I breathed in, ducked, and made it, thankfully having remembered to take down the TV aerial before I set off. That bridge is closely followed, round a corner, by another one with the first lock on the other side. Mooring to go and set that lock, I grounded on the shallow depth, causing me to recall wistfully the many feet of unfettered water that had been below the hull only a day or so before.

How the lower Stratford likes to tease boaters coming off the Avon! Those low bridges kept on coming, the single locks were tight and for good measure a smattering of narrow brick bridges also pepper the canal, my fellow boaters’ surprise at the tightness also being apparent, largely from the big chunks taken out of the brickwork.

I’m not moaning, honest I’m not; it was just a shock and a reminder that I needed to switch back to “canal” mode and steer with a bit more precision than of late. Soon enough, like riding a bicycle, it all came back and a normal level of navigational competence was restored (you can make up your own mind as to what that level is).