Onto The Middle Levels

3 Mobile Internet signal is pretty dire round these parts so the blog's a bit behind the times.....sorry

After the fiasco with the mouse, we finally left Peterborough on Wednesday. We'd booked to go through Stanground Lock onto the Middle Levels a.k.a The Fens. The lock keeper sold us a special windlass and key which were needed for Ashline and Marmont Priory Locks and gave us a couple of "free" guides to the area.

The Middle Levels are basically drainage ditches which provide irrigation, land drainage and flood protection to The Fens and date back to the 1600's when they were designed and built by a Dutchman called Vermuyden. It's a flat, windy place as can be seen by the many, many wind turbines which border the waterway.

The only landmark we saw was this line of electricity pylons stretching as far as the eye could see.

 We crossed the Greenwich Meridian

saw this happy chappy a couple of times

When we got to March the channel is extremely overgrown by willow trees. We had to sound our horn as the skipper of this boat couldn't see us and was heading straight for us.

We pulled over to the first set of visitor moorings we came across and moored beside the park. The local kids came down for a swimming lesson later. Their idea of teaching one of the teenagers to swim was to throw his shoes into the middle of the river and then make him jump in and "swim" to fetch them. Not ideal, but after half an hour he was swimming doggy paddle. He'd got quite badly grazed when getting out onto the concrete pontoon so I gave him some antiseptic wipes. His girlfriend was worried he'd catch Aids from the water, which is a pretty sad state of affairs that by their age they don't know how that disease is caught!

March is a pretty town with floral displays everywhere we went.

We had a couple of beers in The Ship Inn which is above the main town moorings.

On Friday there was a HUGE thunderstorm which caused flash flooding in the town. We were in Sainsbury's when it started and took shelter in The Ship for a couple of hours in the hope that the rain would stop long enough for us to get back to the boat. When the pub started flooding and the river bank and road outside the pub started collapsing we decided to make a dash for it back to the boat. We got soaked to the skin but the boat was fine. The water level went up by about a foot over the next hour but then dropped again just as quickly. The storm hadn't put a stop to the swimming lessons and the kids were back again in the evening. This time they were jumping into the river from the footpath above.

When we left the town on Saturday morning the full extent of the damage was evident. The moorings will be out of use for quite a while I should think.

Stowaway

We've had a few,days back in Peterborough while Roger repainted under the gunwales on both sides of the boat.

I've spent the time spring cleaning the boat as on Monday morning we realised we had a stowaway on board when we found mouse droppings under the fin rads. I HATE mice, almost to the point of being phobic so a quick trip to Wilko in town for traps was in order. I bought up everything they had in stock - 2 humane traps and 2 splat traps - but didn't have much faith in them catching the little blighter. How wrong was I....... Within an hour we'd caught one in a splat trap in the engine room. It was a little field mouse, totally out of proportion size-wise to its droppings or maybe that was just me being paranoid. So I've now been right through the boat from stem to stern, emptying every drawer and cupboard and washing all pots, pans and bedding "just in case".

Wilko have done well out of this little mouse as I went back yesterday and bought loads of "Tupperware" type storage boxes and reorganized my food drawers and cupboards so there's no chance of any future stowaways having access to food supplies. I suppose we've been lucky that this is the only mouse we've seen in the 6 years we've had the boat.
Roger thinks it may originally have been living in the cupboard in the engine room where he keeps his fishing tackle and ground bait as one of the packets had been nibbled through, then when he'd thrown the bait away it had come inside looking for food.

Needless to say he won't be keeping any more ground bait if I have anything to do with it!

We left Peterborough this morning and are now at Whittlesey on the Middle Levels. We're going to spend a few weeks exploring the Fens, maybe going to King 's Lyn and Cambridge. I'll let you know how we get on.