A New Canal.....

...... for me, not literally!

Our stay at Hem Heath was quiet and undisturbed, the only problem for me was the close proximity of the housing opposite with their higher vantage point, it makes me feel like I am being watched. With no real reason to stop there another day we decided to continue on today.

We had a run of about 3miles through the outskirts of Stoke and the city centre before we would reach the first of the Stoke Locks, a flight of five lifting us 50’ exactly, according to my Pearson’s guide.

The graffiti began quite quickly, although some of it was quite handy.

Some of the old rolling stock had been cleverly given a new lease of life.

The huge incinerator looms as you approach the equally large bridge 109 which carries the A500, neither are pleasant to me although I guess some would find them appealing.

Beneath bridge 110 the nowadays too common evidence that someone may have spent the night here, the graffiti far less attractive than some I’ve seen, and also a rusty bike and scooter obviously recovered from the canal, welcome to Stoke!

Passing Dolphin Wharf there was quite a line of plastic cruisers, all lacking any love and attention and also lacking any current licences.

Nice to see someone has a sense of the important things in life though.

And this boat was different but I thought admirable, astro turf roof, wood shingled sides and a canoe as a rain cover over the bow doors, I loved it!

Evidence of a time gone by is still to be found in the odd place.

 I laughed at this sign in 2016 and I laughed again today, you couldn’t make it up, surely?

You don’t get to see much of the actual city but the Civic Centre can be seen from the canal.

And just after passing that we began up the locks, they have some interesting  approaches and views, I won’t describe how we worked through them, but work through them we did.

There were volounteers on the top lock (40)

 which was fortunate because going up was Rod myself and another behind me, coming down were four boats, the pound between lock 39 and 40 is short, so a bit of thought was needed to avoid a log jam, but it all went ok and we were soon making the tight turn onto new waters, The Caldon Canal, the turn cuts back at an acute angle and is (I would think) impossible for a boat of any length to do in one go, so a bit of reversing to achieve a nice three point turn ( no picture, I was busy!) before I pulled onto the service point. Rod had move just ahead to the 48 hour visitor moorings.

Having made the turn on to the Caldon canal, on the services point.

After doing the usual fill and empty and offloading rubbish I also moved up to the visitor moorings.

Current mooring:

 Totals today: 4 miles : 5 locks

There is a Statue of James Brindley (1716-1772) opposite our mooring which was unveiled in 1990, a nice spot for him to look out over some of his handiwork!

We took a quick wander around the corner to look at the Bedford Street Staircase locks (1&2), it’s difficult to get high enough to obtain a good picture of this type of structure but basically it is two or more locks joined directly together to raise or lower you more rapidly and save on the number of gates required, in this case the two locks have only three sets of gates instead of the normal four, there you go, clear as mud!

I am stood on a small footbridge between the upper and lower lock chambers
looking down at lock 1 the bottom chamber

Having turned around 180 degrees I am now looking at the upper chamber
with the middle shared gates in front of me.

 That's my explanation done!