That’s Bancroft Basin, Stratford upon Avon, we arrived here just about lunchtime today.
Yesterday was a long day, with 9 locks and and no less than 3 aqueducts. nb Katherine was immobilised just before Wootton Wawen aqueduct with what turned out to be a huge length of plastic around the prop which caused some delay to our progress.
We’ve done aqueducts before but they were just like bridges with proper sides and stuff but these were on the style of the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct on the Llangollen Canal which is a cast iron trough with a towpath on one side and nothing on the other!The Edstone Aqueduct was the last and highest of the trio and to quote Waterscape:
Edstone (or Bearley) Aqueduct is one of the earliest cast iron canal aqueducts in the country and is the longest in England. It has a low level towpath and crosses a river, railway and a road. It is one of the local wonders of the canal network.
We considered continuing down part of the next flight of locks and set off on a reccy but decided that we would stay put which turned out to be a “good decision” as it started to pour with rain soon afterwards.
So this morning we made a 8 o’clock start and made our way down the Wilmote flight to the edge of Stratford which we did in good time, so stopped for a bacon and egg breakfast. Afterwards we carried on to Stratford arriving about lunchtime. I have to say that The bridges on the Stratford Canal seem to be some of the narrowest we have encountered not to mention the debris at every bridge-hole and some of the lock by-washes (overflows) were viscious. We had been warned that the canal got shallower as Stratford was approached and we found it to be true.
We reached Bancroft Basin in Stratford and found moorings on the finger pontoons which were so difficult to get onto as the wind which had picked up during the morning making lining up for locks a problem made mooring here a nightmare as the pontoons were floating and bobbing about and even the bowthruster couldn’t fight the wind. Fortunatly we were rescued by nb Lacy Fair who helped Joy with the mooring ropes and nb Katherine who shunted us into line before nb Xilion Rose did the same for them. Its all about cooperation on the canal 😀
Tomorrow I have to visit the dentist, so have hired a car to take us back to Bloxham and Banbury, so no boating tomorrow.