Third time un-lucky

The BW rescue team get into action

The offending items caught in the keb
Evacuating Brian from the trapped boat

Until five p.m. it had been just one of those averagely ordinary and rather forgettable days. We'd done eight locks down to Stone, queued at all of them and put up with weather that alternated between rain and humid heat every 15 minutes. Then we'd walked around Stone and not found anything bar a couple of paperbacks in the charity.
But at 5 p.m. the sun came out and we decided that we might as well move on rather than sitting around listening to the bloke behind running his engine and the people in the house across the cut do their power-tool diy in the back garden.
We'd barely gone 400 yards when the canal was blocked by a hire boat that had pulled its moorings. Not surprising; it was so badly moored - on a bend and with the pins sitting in marshy soil. We did our best to re-moor it and moved on.
A half mile further and a couple of little lads flagged us down at a bridge. Their fishing line and float had got caught in a tree on the off side. We stopped and Vicky pulled it free with the boathook.
A few hundred yards further and we came to Aston lock, filled it, went in, tried to open the gates to get out...and one wouldn't open fully. I tried to get through, we jammed and just about pulled free back into the lock.
I spent the next 20 minutes prodding and poking behind the gate to try and locate what was jamming it. No luck. So we called BW and within half an hour a couple of blokes turned up armed with the tool for the job - a keb. (A sort of long handled fork cum rake.) They prodded and scraped and found the culprits - two large bricks that had come away from the lock wall.
A few minutes later we were off and a few minutes after that we were moored and eating a late fry-up tea. Just a mile from the place we'd left two and a half hours earlier!