Just back from this years trip I cannot recall the canals being in a worst state. Without going into massive detail the one thing that we noticed again and again is how shallow the most used routes had become over much of their lengths.
This shallowing is really noticable on what is the main link-route from north to south. From Heywood (wot no toilets at this busy junction BW!) along the Trent and Mersey to Fradley (with its joke moorings and shop where you can have coffee while boaters stroll through with their elsans) Then down the Coventry (passing the local BW HQ with room for one boat only outside and BW men at work trimming the office hedge). Then on to the Oxford boat (where the African Queen would fit in well). And all the way we see boat after boat on the move - stirring up the mud behind as try even manage a slow walking place to get from A to B. Looking behind our slow boat often wee were grinding along for the most part doing the same - raising the mud. Now there always were spots along the north Coventry that have always been like this and in the days when BW was run by engineers and not canal managers they dredged them regularly. Not now - now the managers who rule don't seem to have a clue - but do have a bagful of excuses (if you get any response at all) and under their administration the rest of the system is going shallow too. Yet this is the same system BW who want to put 10,000 more boats on in the next few years. What sort of boats will they be? Maybe airboats - as in the Forida ones that skim over the surface in a few inches of water. Mind you - the way the vegetation is being allowed to grow across the canals in places - one wonders if BW plan to narrow them to a one way system around the canals or a today north, tomorrow south way of working. Or do they actually plan anything at all - after all it's cheaper to do nowt and most of those in charge will be long gone in a few years leaving the next lot to say (as one BW senior said to me at a bank collapse) - "It's bad workmanship but its nothing to do with me - I haven't worked here that long and those that did this arn't here anymore!"
