I went over to the Canal World forums to find some expert views on this. I learnt the following:
- trans issues can be shoehorned into any discussion on any forum
- there are a lot of internet experts
- in the good old days, things were better and the boat would have been rescued quickly, but these days there is too much H&S
- that lock is particularly narrow which is why the two boats are wedged
- all the locals have different opinions on how it happened, and none of the stories are consistent e.g. they tried to exit at the same time and became wedged
- if the boaters had been paying attention as opposed to be being glued to their phones, it wouldn't have happened
- some technical stuff about fenders and paddles.
And now for my expert opinion, they were raising the water when something got stuck on the lock gate on the way up. They then decided to lower the water to free whatever it was, but they remained stuck either because of the original bit didn't unstick itself or because the boats were at angle and got wedged because it was so narrow.
