Home on The Nene

The weather forecast on the BBC says that at 9.00am it will be a mixture of cloud and sunshine. At 9.00am the rain hammers on the roof and all the sky is black and grey. Have all the forecasters gone away on holiday and left the cleaners to make a guess at the weather?

We set off when the rain stops.  My new crew member gets the hang of it all pretty quickly.  By Alwalton lock she can get off the boat, lower the guillotine gate and open the pointy gate without spilling a drop of wine from the glass she is carrying.



Water Newton

All goes well apart from a few minutes of not managing the 90degree turn onto the lock landing at Yarwell Mill. I explain to the watchers that it is the fault of the wind but they don’t look convinced.

We stop amongst the cows at Elton and look forward to eating at The Crown Inn.  When we get there the pub is sparsely populated and the restaurant is half full but they tell us that they can’t feed us because they are two fryers down and not accepting any more diners.  That is a bit puzzling because The Crown is not a pub that appears to rely on it’s fryers. We try for the sympathy vote and say that we are on a boat on the river so don’t have transport and the crew member has a bad knee.  The young barman looks puzzled and says ‘what river?’

Failing to persuade The Crown to feed us we set off for the Loch Fynne restaurant up the hill. I assure my limping companion that it is only a few minutes walk.  She wants to take a taxi. As I’m explaining that this isn’t London and taxi’s aren’t a common feature around here a black cab draws alongside and asks if we want to go anywhere.

So we take the taxi and she discovers that the walk would have been a lot longer than a few minutes. We ask the driver about a ride back to the river when we have eaten. ‘Is there a river here?’ he says.

We have a lovely meal and the restaurant ring for a taxi.  The driver is Chinese and didn’t know there was a river near Elton.  He is very amused that we want dropping off at a farm gate and will walk across a field to spend the night on a boat.  As we hobble off by the light of the torch we can hear him laughing delightedly.

To Peterborough

I leave March quite early in the morning.  The forecast is for a hot and humid day and it is already warm and clammy.

Fight my way through the overhanging willow trees and then out of March and passed The Middle Level Commissioners offices where three weed-cutters wait for me to pass and then turn and follow.  Looking behind me all I can see are their metal jaws, no sight of drivers or propulsion just three sets of jaws following me upriver.  They look threatening, I wonder if they heard I nearly squashed one of their tribe a few weeks ago and they are out to get me.  I wonder if they are following me onto an isolated stretch of river where they will attack me, metal jaws chomping through the steel of Rea. I round a bend check to see if they have gained any ground and find they have disappeared.

Progress is good the weed cutters must already have been this way.  The water is clear, weed and reeds and fishes are clearly visible. Chunks of blanket weed float passed, green topped with algae their skirts billowing gracefully beneath the water.  They look like large, benign jelly fish as they pass the stern.

Stop at Whittlesey lock and remove blanket weed from prop.  The lock has been left set against me (the downstream paddles should be left open) and not only that the paddles (or penstocks as The Middle Levels call them) are also open.  It takes a long tiring wind to close both  upstream paddles (or penstocks) and open the bottom ones, put the boat in, close the gates start all over again then moor up and come back and re-set the lock. I started to count how many tough turns it takes to open each penstock, I got to thirty three turns lost the will to live and stopped counting.  Two fat women lean on the fence and solemnly watch my every move.  I’m beginning to feel the effects of heat exhaustion but it’s only another couple of hours to Peterborough.

Manage Briggate Bend with a full audience, a lot of revs but without hitting anything. The wind gets up and I lose my hat. Meet the first boat under the only bridge on the system which has tight turn and we narrowly avoid collision. Into Peterborough and discover that when I dashed down for water in Whittlesey I had left the tap running so the water tank is empty.  Fill with water: shop: meet up with friend at the café at The Key Theatre. Look round Peterborough, actually just look for a pub in Peterborough.  We sit outside a bar in a quiet Cathedral Square drinking chill lager watching the fading sun glow on the mellow stone of the Cathedral Gate and the old Guildhall. 

I love balmy summer evenings.
 

Oh dear

The BBC weather forecasters lied to me.  Tuesday afternoon was warm and sunny with only a few splatters of rain.  Wednesday, which they had previously forecast dry and cloudy, turned out to be wet and wet.

Setting off from Salters Lode in a grey drizzle my progress down Well Creek was better than the outward journey, the weed-cutters have been out. Almost stopped at Glady Dacks Staithe, didn’t need to stop but what a wonderful name, Glady Dacks sounds like a character from a Thomas Hardy novel. It wasn’t until Upwell that I picked up my own clumps of weed so I stopped to remove it.  Laying flat on my not very flat stomach, sawing away with the bread knife I heard a clunk and saw my mobile phone sitting in the amongst the soggy gunk in the depths of the bilge, it had fallen out of the pouch in the waterproofs. Oh dear I said.

Onwards towards March: the wind turbines loom out of low cloud, their blades turning tiredly. The drizzle is turning into proper rain.  It seems my waterproof isn’t. I have plenty of time to formulate a plan for the retrieval of the phone.  I’ll get a small fishing net and scoop it out of the bilges, remove the sim card and put it in an old phone. I have to keep smiling and waving at all the fishermen lining the bank so there must be a fishing tackle shop in March. I can find lots of fish and chip shops (the inhabitants of March must live on fish and chips) but no fishing tackle shops. I do find a launderette and spend an entertaining time watching two young men try to work out the mechanics of washing clothes.  ‘We should never have left home’ says one starring a large pile of wet and tangled garments.

In the end I buy a cheapo long handled brush and pan from Thing Me Bobs, saw the end off the pan so it fits into the bilge and hey presto I have retrieved the phone. The old Nokia, me and the sim card are reunited and it feels like old times.  I never did like the other phone, it was a replacement for an HTC that I dropped in a puddle and it was horrible.  Keypad too small, switched off for no apparent reason froze when it felt like it and the battery had the life-span of a fruit fly.  If it starts to show any signs of recovery I’ll just sling it into the bilges again.