Winter stoppages, water voles and wasted money

NABO council member and West Midlands representative Peter Braybrook comments on some more topical issues.

I HAVE received feedback on my piece last month. I referred to the term ‘boating season’, which I now understand is not appropriate for many readers who boat 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. My apologies for any offence caused.

We, meanwhile, have now returned to our home mooring and sadly any activity during the coming months will be very local – if at all. One lock to the north of us is going close for lock gate replacement and there are other planned stoppages to the south, including a lift bridge replacement. Such is the necessity of a winter works programme.

NABO has a representative on the planning committee for the Canal & River Trust’s winter stoppage programme so we have some input into the planning process. We have noticed a lack of local knowledge and some closures of long lengths of canal in the first draft of the programme that would have inconvenienced many liveaboard boaters, and we are pleased that some of these have been corrected in the final plan.

Where winding holes are located should be common knowledge to any person working on the cut but I recently had a surprising phone call from a local manager asking where to turn a fulllength boat in my locality! However, we have also noticed that the final draft of the winter work programme is smaller than the first draft.

Having been assured by the trust that this year’s plan would be executed in full after the cancellations and delays that occurred last winter, it appears that the cloth has been cut to size in advance this time around. This is disturbing. As I have said before, putting off planned routine maintenance is a risky business. It suggests that the future will be one of structural failure and continued decay.

Vole sighting

I have experienced a first this year. I have been boating since 1999 and enjoy being on the tiller and observing the wildlife. I have seen several snakes, terrapins, mink, an otter and other creatures in the canal, but until this summer I had never seen a water vole.

I know what they look like; I used to watch them on my local river when I was a boy. Apparently they have the reputation of being the most common unseen mammal in the UK, beating bats, dormice, red squirrels and badgers.

I knew they were around because there are information boards that have been erected to tell the public what the trust is doing to help. There are three storyboards on the offside of the North Oxford Canal on inaccessible land near a high voltage switching station with pretty pictures but print that is too small to read from a narrowboat in the channel – and the water is too shallow to get closer.

The vole I saw was swimming across the course of my boat and scampered to the towpath shore as it approached, diving into a hole in the bank between bagged concrete ‘blocks’ that form the canal wall. I noticed that about 2m away from the hole was a coir roll-topped section of bank. Obviously the vole had chosen to reject the assistance given to it by Canal & River Trust... or it hadn’t read the information boards.

I was so thrilled to have seen it that I shared the event with a boater who I know has been boating for 60 years. “Oh, they are on my mooring!” she said. She also told me they were very happy with the Armco piling on the banks and used her fenders to get up out of the water. Resourceful little creatures, aren’t they, surviving and thriving without the trust’s assistance and money?

Pound foolish

Many boaters have commented to me that the way money is spent is of great concern to them. As the cost of living crisis hits and prices continue to rise, everybody appreciates that we need to take care of the pennies because the pounds are not taking care of themselves.

I have heard many comments about the plethora of unnecessary blue and white signage giving solely the ‘making life better by water’ message. Raising brand awareness, I think it is called. I noted a new sign next to the towpath as I worked up Atherstone Lock No 6. It said ‘Atherstone locks 5 mins’ with an arrow pointing toward locks 5 to 1. I was already six locks into the flight! Erecting a standalone sign, including setting in the post and so on, is not cheap.

There has also been comment that there is waste of money in deploying valuable manpower like sending a two-man team to the same lock every morning to adjust water levels because lock gates leak so badly that the pound above empties overnight. There are signs at the lock telling the public not to use the paddles for water movement overnight, so this was probably assumed to be the root of the problem.

The problem actually is that the lock before this one has new gates and they don’t leak! Basically, local opinion from the boaters who are left sleeping on the tilt every morning is that the wrong lock was maintained first. A simple mistake. Hopefully this problem will be solved by this winter’s stoppage programme. It is included in the pared down programme referred earlier.

Other good news is that the trust has found some dredgers and some money to operate them. There will not be end-to-end dredging, of course, but this winter there is a planned programme of clearing known shallow sections. That will make room for more water in the canal – and we all know we need that. I have heard no news on the other perennial problem of offside vegetation clearance, but there is time for that to come.