Seventeen out of twenty one ain't bad

Braunston Bash 2012 Day 14
Birmingham to Wolverhampton Lock 17

The original plan was to stop in Wolverhampton tonight, and finish our journey with a full day's travelling tomorrow. But a Social Event is being organised which we cannot miss, and because the was a possibility that it would be tomorrow night, we decided to press on and get the Wolverhampton locks unr our belt before retiring.

It was windy and all the locks were against us. With no helpers I was having to wait while Jim filled each lock, constantly drifting out of position, and once finding some substantial rocks on the bottom, from which I only managed to remove myself by getting Jim to send some more water down into the pound. In stark contrast to our epic hour and three quarter ascent with Sickle and four crew, we took three and a half hours to descend the first seventeen, and decided to call it a day in the long pound between 17 and 16.

I was not in the best of tempers anyway, as whilst in the second lock I said to Jim that we'd be fine now if the Social Event were to be on Saturday, and he told me that he had been told that it was now definitely Sunday! If I'd known that, we'd be on that nice offside mooring in Wolverhampton tonight, eating a massive pizza (obviously we'd have had to swim to get it. Or moved the boat).

When I went to stop the engine I observed a third, possibly new (because if it had been leaking at that rate for long there'd be none left in the tank) diesel leak. We replaced the gaskets in the fuel pump, with Colin's help, at Braunston, and thought we'd fixed it. Then Jim found and fixed another one the day before yesterday, and has now, hopefully fixed the one I just found, at a joint at the fuel filter. Do you remember that installation in the Tate Modern Turbine Hall which was a massive tank of oil that you could walk across on bridges? That's our engine bilge, that is.