The plan for the week was to do the ‘Stourport ring’. Daughter Nikki & son in law Paul were due to come with us this week on Symphony and had booked their holidays accordingly. Now that we no longer had to be back by Friday morning we could go more leisurely over eight days instead of six.

We knew that the first two days would be longish with quite a few locks to do. Nikki was 8 months pregnant so would be limited in her paddle winding abilities.

The original aim for the first day was to get to the top of the Stourbridge 16, but I was advised that this wasnt a good place to overnight, so we went on to the top of the Delph flight and round the corner a bit, just before the Merryhill shopping centre. The mooring is very safe here with street lights and CCTV.

We did 33 locks today and surprisingly we didnt have a single one against us that we had to empty. On a couple of occasions we had to wait for a descending boat, but other than that they were all empty!