In 2016 we only spent the one night in Portishead, because we were eager to get back up to the canal system which connects to the River Avon in the centre of Bath. Christine was with us, so she had to get the passage planning perfect. There were 3 available locking times to enter Bristol Floating Harbour, we didn’t want to be either early or late because there are no waiting pontoons in the river and we would have the same enormous tidal range to deal with in a confined space. Therefore we carefully planned to arrive just in time for the middle locking, leaving Portishead behind 3 narrowboats.
There is only a very short open sea passage between Portishead and Avonmouth, but it gave Chris some cause for concern when we started rolling to the swell and again when she thought we were going the wrong side of the Avonmouth pierhead and heading for the putty. There are no navigation marks in the Avon at all (it flows far too fast for them to hold) and the river simply enters the Severn Estuary down by the outside of the Avonmouth Harbour which takes most of the current shipping for the South West of England. The VTS office is built on this large breakwater.
As soon as we entered the Avon a little tug came storming past us and then after 10 minutes it suddenly turned about and stopped. “Strange behaviour”, we thought, until we heard them speaking on the radio to the MV Balmoral – a famous old pleasure steamer that was viiting Bristol, they were there to escourt the ship up the river.
The Balmoral soon came into sight and we pulled over to let them past and when they had passed we increased speed to meet our deadline for the lock opening.
When we arrived at the lock entrance, this was the sight that met us – a completely full chamber of boats so we had to wait outside after all, and to add insult to injury, we were not allowed into the harbour while the Balmoral was turning, and it transpired they were not even staying for a day, so we ended up waiting for them to make their prestigious departure under Brunel’s bridge.
The lockkeepers were very appologetic for the hours of delays and helped us tie up to the end of their bullnose whilst the tide continued to flood in and the Balmoral completed its tour.
It was late in the day when we finally tied up at Baltic Wharf in the harbour and the rest of the family were very glad to get on board again to get their tea. We were blessed with this magnificent view out of the saloon window – “Shaun the Sheep”, in the two days we were there, it must have been photographed 1000s of times – some chartity event in the city.
On our last transit E to W of the canal system in 2013 we had carried the parts of the wheelhouse with us, but this time we took it down and packed the windows, roof and doors in a road trailer to take back home.
The next day we headed off out of the harbour and up the very empty River Avon. There had not been much rain so we made good progess against the gentle current. We found it quite easy to tie up to a tree for a lunch break
Despite the floods which regularly occur in these river valleys some brave souls still choose to moor their boats in strange places – perhaps they find somewhere else for the winter?
Two days later were below the weir in the centre of Bath, tied up under the railway arch for lunch before tackling the Bath flight of locks, one of which has the second highest rise in the UK. We left the barge in Bath and set off for home in the car with the trailer behind containing the dismantled wheelhouse sections. Then we had the family holiday in Beaumorris.
Straight after the stay in Beaumorris we met the Glasson sailing club cruisers in Conway on our way home.
When we returned to Bath we had to leave as soon as we could and we started along the narrow canal past the hundreds of moored boats on the most popular stretch of the Kennet and Avon up to Bradford-on Avon. The next night we spent on a good visitor mooring next to the “George Inn”
The road below the George Inn crosses the Great Western Railway and it was an ideal vantage point for us to observe some remarkable engineering works taking place. They were lowering the trackbed by up to 1m and completely renewing all the track in both directions ready for electrification. The work was all completed from specialised machinery running on first the old rails and then on the old. They were working round the clock in shifts, and had given themselves a month to complete the whole job.
Our next night’s mooring was in a fantastic position – in the enterance basin to the Dundas Aqueduct, plenty of boat movement to watch. Whilst it was going dark about 8pm a gentleman arrived in a car and asked had we seen a wooden boat going past? An hour of so a launch did appear and it sounded like someone came to it and started a generator and they were pulling a big tarpaulin over and under it. “Strange behaviour” we thought again, but you do need to be a bit alternative to own a wooden boat these days. Anyway, I got up early in the morning and the boat was on the bottom – sunk! A beautifully restored gentleman’s launch, I couldn’t believe it.
At 8am the gentleman I had seen the night before arrived with some petrol in cans and started up a pump to empty it and he refloated it after a couple of hours pumping, he was not at all bothered, and when he had dried his engine and seats out, he started up the old ford engine and set off down the canal towards Bath.
Next day we continued our steady progress and went through the Avoncliffe woods, squeezing past lots of interestng “liveaboard” boats.
Then over the next aqueduct ( the one with the obvious and worrying sag due to having been built with Bath stone) and we finally found a mooring at Bradford on Avon for the night.
31st May 2016
CCMJ arrived to sail into central London
