Going Home - August 2012

 

I leave March early giving me plenty of time to get to my booked slot at Stanground for Ipm but progress is slow. The drains I’m traveling on are shallow and weedy, I have to stop twice to remove weed from the propeller.  When I get to the lock at Whittlesey I can’t find the key to unlock the padlock on the gate on the fence surrounding the lock. Maybe I never had one. This means I definitely won’t make Stanground by 1pm so I call the lock-keeper, she tells me there are two boats heading in my direction and they’ll open the gates for me.  I suspect I know the occupants of the two boats.  I’ll get a lot of flak for not having the right equipment.  They arrive: I know them:  the derogatory comments flow freely. I decline the invitation to turn around and join them on their travels  because I’ve vowed never to go through that tidal stretch of The Great Ouse again. 

 

I overnight at Whittlesey, get to Peterborough in the morning and head off up The Nene more or less uneventfully, except at Stibbington.  I’m stung on the back of my leg and it hurts, I’m level with an EA mooring when it happens so make a quick decision to stop and slap some anti-histamine on the sting. I turn in and am about to get off, think I’m a bit too near a river cruiser, put the boat into reverse and then get off.  Despite a history of making silly mistakes I have never before stepped off the boat leaving it in gear. I blame that nasty critter that stung me. It took a few seconds to realise why the boat wasn’t going where I was pulling it. In those few seconds it had progressed far enough from the bank for me to be unable to get back on.  I panicked had flashes of the boat crashing and overturning and causing general mayhem.  I wrapped the rope tightly around a bollard, the pontoon rocked violently, momentarily I thought boat, me, pontoon and cruiser would all be heading towards Peterborough then the boat came in and I was able to hop on the gunwales and put the gear into neutral.  After that it was plain sailing apart from mis-calculating the distance between Yarwell and Elton and having to travel in the dark for half an hour before I reached my night-time mooring.

 

In the two days on The Nene I didn’t meet any boats in locks, just passed a couple of cruisers on the open river.  Then at Aston I pulled up at the lock, decided to make a coffee and grab a late lunch and suddenly there were boats to the left of me boats to the right of me all wanting to know why I had stopped there.  ‘Was I going to be long?’ ‘Did I know I shouldn’t stop at a lock?’ ‘Was I intending going through?’  Oh bugger off the lot of you I just needed a break.