Random Writings

I set off in the late morning, having earlier attempted to coax some software into life and failed… oh well. I took the boat along the Nottingham Canal, negotiating the sharp bend past the EnviroEnergy district heating plant, which incinerates the city’s waste and delivers hot water for heating to the civic buildings. Beyond the plant the canal has been smartened up nicely and there were lots of people using the towpath as I stopped to go through Castle Lock. All the locks in Nottingham and above are canal-style broad locks, no more power-operated locks!
Soon afterwards I stopped on a convenient mooring (and there are a lot of well-placed mooring rings throughout Nottingham) and did a little shopping – in Sainsburys and at the chandlery of Nottingham Castle Marina, where I managed to get an exact replacement for the dodgy switch for the shower drain pump, hurrah! Once beyond the marina, the Nottingham Canal becomes the Beeston Cut and gets very slightly wider. This is an industrial area of town, with various small factories and two large ones – the John Player tobacco factory stands almost opposite the huge Boots head office and pharmaceutical plant. Once past the factories, the cut comes to Beeston, with a pleasant grassy verge being a popular place to moor. At Beeston Lock I passed back into the immensely wide river again, almost giving my agoraphobia after the canal! This stretch of river is rather Thames-like, with lots of little summerhouses along the banks and lots of moored boats. There’s also a rather fine island, Barton Island, with tall trees. Once I got closer it became clear that it belongs to the 2nd Beeston Sea Scouts, being easily the coolest Scout HQ I’ve ever seen…

After Barton Island comes Cranfleet Lock, a very deep lock out of the Trent and into a short cut that avoids Thrumpton Weir. The lock is unusual in several respects. Firstly, no windlass is required – handles have been welded on to all the paddles! Secondly, like all the Trent locks, it has no ground paddles. There are four gate paddles, but with the lock being so deep they only need to be open a crack to fill the lock with torrents of water. Most unusually there are no warning signs about turbulence or use of gate paddles, which surprised me very much, given BW’s enthusiasm for them elsewhere. I’ve moored just above the lock – a local boater assured me that I could moor on a vacant residential mooring for the night. Tomorrow we bid farewell to the Trent and join the Soar to head towards Leicester at last.

Day 66: Nottingham (Trent Bridge) to Cranfleet, 9 miles and 4 locks.
Total so far: 709 miles and 429 locks.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 9th, 2010 at 10:18 pm and is filed under Narrowboat.