The submerged Santander bikes of the East

Today's patrol began at Limehouse Basin. I cycled down through Stratford and Mile End Park so I was able to get this pic of the lock at Commercial Road on the Regents Canal.

Commercial Road Lock No. 12.

Plaque at BWML office, Limehouse Basin.

SD and I met at the marina offices. The marina is run by BWML, which is an enterprise set up to run the marinas and moorings that BW owned, for the benefit of the Canal & River Trust.

In the workshop basement of the offices is a small area set aside for Trust volunteer stores, with a lifejacket and some gloves and tools available. To access this one needs to sign in at the office and tell them what you're doing, they get worried seeing people creeping around their basement unannounced!

I picked up a new pair of work gloves - which were to come in handy later when we manhandled some rubbish away from the towpath to bins nearby.

Proposed vistor moorings at Limehouse Basin.

The marina is proposing to add a few new visitor berths on pontoons to the right of the yellow lines in this picture (I've superimposed the lines over some buoys and lines in the water) leaving the area to the right for manoeuvring and winding. It'll be a squeeze, but I expect no real problems myself.

Foliage above Commercial Road Lock

SD and I left to walk Limehouse Cut and the Lee Navigation up to Old Ford Locks No. 19. There was immediately some foliage above Commercial Road bridge that could use some attention from shears and loppers, so we reported this.

Santander Bike

Santander Bike

Moped and Shopping Trolley

The day was cloudy but the water was impressively glassy. Being able to see the canal bed meant we could easily see things that had been left there, in this case two Santander hire bikes, a moped, and the almost-obligatory shopping trolley. These all got reported to enquiries.london@canalrivertrust.org.uk via the Jotform app, SD helpfully pointing in photos to show the location of the submerged cycle menaces.

Planning permission for 10 residential moorings.

The Limehouse Cut is under-used for mooring at the moment, but this is changing fast. As well as the new leisure moorings at Burdett Road we spotted this planning application for an offside pontoon mooring complex between Upper North Steet and Watts Grove. With a cycle store aboard a service narrowboat, that's creative thinking!

At Bow Locks we came across a towpath task force team that were rooting out plants from the brickwork and generally improving things with some quick maintenance. Another volunteer was filming with an impressive camera gimbal set-up that we admired enviously.

Just a little further along we met TO, a Trust waterways manager, who asked if we might later be able to do some anti-graffiti work. Foul-languaged graffiti is a bit of a problem on this particular stretch, and he'd like us to carry some neutral coloured spray cans to delete the foulest stuff with. We asked them to email our manager DS about it...
...who was just coming off our welcome station boat Jena, a hundred metres or so further up the navigation at Three Mills. In fact, all the staff towpath and mooring managers and rangers were there having just had a meeting. We talked operations for a little while and then moved on, along the Lee Navigation through Bow, past the Crossrail works, to Old Ford Locks No. 19.

Here S, and their team of volunteers were continuing to put work into improving the stable structure for its future use as a welcome station and base of operations for the Carpenters Road lock keeping team.

Fallen tree at Old Ford Locks No. 19.

Last week's storms had blown down this tree into the towpath here. The local volunteers were preoccupied, so I pointed it out and S said they would work to clear it.

Carpenters Road Lock

I went home via the Olympic Park, where the gantries and winding gear for Carpenters Road Lock were all installed, along with the gate buffers. This is coming along fast now!

3 hours.