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August 2023 – A little adventure, Droitwich to Birmingham

We only have about a week with all the family on the boat and we have decided to do a quick trip to Birmingham. Sonia, Mary, Obi (The Dog) and I arrived at the Droitwich Spa Marina on Sunday about 8pm we left home after Mary had finished her Sunday job working in the café of a local garden centre, Antony and Ellie arrived form Reading at around 10:30pm.

With the team assembled the plan was to get the boats waste tank pumped out at about 10am on Monday when the marina office opened, before heading off up the Birmingham and Worcester Canal.

Need to know when it is time to pump out, see our fool proof
method of knowing when you pump out before it is to late?

Monday morning arrived and we started late, lazily then decided to send Sonia and Mary off to McD for our breakfast, then we needed to head to Waitrose for supplies, and when we finally got to the pump out we had to wait for another boat. In the end somehow it was noon before we set off, we then had a little fun against the wind in the marina trying the back out away from the pump out dock and then turn around to exit onto the canal.

Nearing the end of our first day we passed our boats original home at Black Prince (Stole Prior) where we could see their new look Classic and Signature colour schemes

Black Prince at Stoke Prior

After a quite and uneventful trip and 4 ½ hours of chugging we had traveled just over 4 miles and completed 15 locks, our team had got the lock procedure well sorted.

Antony, Ellie, Mary and Sonia (I am behind the camera and Obi is on the boat)

But after the later than planned start we decided to get to started on the Tardebigge in the morning and so stopped for Pizza at The Queens Head, this seems to be becoming a tradition (They have a 2 for 1 deal on Pizza’s between 5 and 6.30pm Monday to Thursday).

So we set the alarm for 7am so we could get an early start up the Tardebigge.

Long term Moorings

Looking for a marina or mooring for you boat, take a look at our map with information on 1000’s of mooring in over 850 sites around the UK canal and river network.

August 2023 – Part 1 – A little adventure, Droitwich to Birmingham
August 2023 – Part 2 – A really Tardebigge adventure
August 2023 – Part 3 – Birmingham Engine Lows and Highs
August 2023 – Part 4 – Lost dog and diner out at Ju Ju’s Cafe
August 2023 – Part 5 – Screwfix almost saves the day

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New Unlimited Smarty SIM for our WIFI

In May 2021 we fitted a Huawei B311 as our internet connection, and at first we used a SMARTY SIM to get access to the internet on there 100GB for £20, but my Daughter soon used that all in the first week of our holiday and the cost of extra GB was stupid!!!, and they would not let me upgrade to a larger data plan until the first month was complete..

So we moved to EE as part of our Family tariff and during this time we put our Daughter on an unlimited data tariff (£££).

SMARTY Unlimited
SMARTY Unlimited

Well now we are back with SMARTY as they have a unlimited Data/Calls/Texts tariff SIM for just £18 per month, and so far no problems, this enables me to update the Moorings Map Page while we are travelling and not worry about watch a film etc etc.

If you are interested we have a referral link https://i.smarty.co.uk/TWt5bGx but you may find better offers if you shop around.

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UPDATE – Canal Moorings Map – Removing the oddities

Just got to 820 locations and now working on removing the weird and wonderful places that seem to be in the CRT data, there are a lot of EoG moorings (End of Garden, so I am told) and clearly private or commercial (Boat yards that do not offer mooring etc) that are being removed.

Please feel free to send me sites we have missed  I need:- Name of location, address and postcode or Lat/long coordinates, and any other detail you have. emailed to “dfloyd @ floyd.co.uk” (Remove the spaces)

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Canal & River Marina & Mooring Guide Map

I am working on a new page for our site, it all started by looking for a new marina for next year. We are very happy at Droitwich Spa Marina and would highly recommend it, but we would like to see some more of the canal network.

The new page started as a spreadsheet of potential marina’s, but it was hard to visualise where these were, so I created a google map from my data, that started to look useful so I added a few more locations, I now have hundreds ready to add and over the next few weeks I should have a good guide ready.

Below is a work in progress version and this will update as I add new places, but, you can also find it on our menu above as this blog post will age and not be so visible soon.

UPDATE: Thanks to some feed back from Canal World Forums I now have some data from the CRT and have imported this into my map, I am now editing the data to add street addresses, phone numbers and web sites as I find them. There are over 500 possible mooring sites to update so this will take a while.

If you have any recommendations please let me know I need:- Name of location, address and postcode, contact number and website URL. emailed to “dfloyd @ floyd.co.uk” (Remove the spaces)

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