Salter's Lode to Denver Sluice

Because we're 65ft long we can only get through Salter's Lode Lock when the tide is right. That meant either 5pm Saturday or 5am Sunday, so you can guess which passage we opted for. The regular Lockie was going on his holiday on Sunday morning too, so that was another deciding factor as we'd much rather have his experience and advice than that of a temporary guy, especially as we haven't done this passage before.

We needed to be in the lock at 4.45 when he closed the outer lock gates behind us and we waited until the rising tide reached the lock so that the level was high enough for us to pass over the cill. He then raised the guillotine gate and we eased slowly out to wait beside the tractor tyres while he closed the lock behind us.

This is the mud bank right outside the lock and which will be an obstacle to avoid when we come back in a month.

As the tide started to come in fast there were 3 small bores (tidal waves) which pushed us backwards towards the lock gates. The Lockie told us they can sometimes be quite big and strong but on Saturday we hardly felt or saw them.

Once the Lockie was happy we had enough depth, we nudged the nose of the boat out into the current which turned us round to the right towards Denver Sluice, missing the mud bank.

It only took 5 minutes to get to Denver Sluice and we moored up on the floating pontoon expecting to be there for the night. We were just setting out the table and chairs for an evening in the sun when Denver's Lockie came down to see us. He wasn't supposed to be on duty but had come to open the gate to let some of the blanket weed out on the falling tide.

As he was opening the lock anyway, he let us through and sold us a month's licence for the River Great Ouse and it's tributaries.

Since then we've been moored on the visitor moorings. The weather has taken a turn for the worse as the remnants of Hurricane Bertha batters the country. We've had thunder storms and extremely strong wind. Luckily for us we're moored beside a high grassy bank which is protecting us from the worst of the wind. A hire boat arrived last night and moored on the opposite bank to wait for it's passage through the lock this morning. The wind was too strong and they struggled for half an hour before giving up and missing their passage. This afternoon they tried again and this time were successful.

I'm hoping for clear skies this evening as I want to watch the "super moon". I think it's going to be too windy to set my telescope up but we'll see later.

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.

Ferry Meadows - Peterborough

I think crossing the Wash has given us a taste for wide open spaces. When we got to Peterborough the other day we did a quick trip to Asda and carried on to moor on Overton Lake at Ferry Meadows which is part of the Nene Park.

The lake is huge and the moorings are good

although the pontoons aren't really dog friendly as they have a wide mesh which neither of the dogs liked walking on. We were OK as Chico is small enough to carry, but Bob had to put mats down for Bentley to walk on.

The park was really busy all day but by 8pm almost everyone had gone home, so we set up on the picnic tables for our last meal together. We'd planned on having another BBQ but it had rained, so we'd each cooked in the boat and just ate together outside.  Yes, we did have a table cloth - well standards must be maintained don't you know!

In the morning we said a sad farewell to Bob & Nicola who were heading back to their home mooring. We've spent a great 3 weeks in their company and hope to cruise with them again soon. In fact the men are already discussing next year's Big Summer Adventure.

We stayed at the park a bit longer so Chico could have some really good walks and doggy fun after being cooped up for so long at Boston and on the long crossing.

There's loads to see and do here and we'll probably pay a return visit in a couple of weeks.

The bird life is very diverse and there were several late/second broods of ducklings and Grebe chicks. I've never seen one as small as this before, must have only been a couple of days old.

There are several tree carvings scattered around the park. These are just two of them

We're now moored in Peterborough for a few days. The moorings here are just at the perfect height for Roger to wash all the salt spray off the boat and do some well overdue paint touching-up. I also need some retail therapy and the shopping centre in the city centre is excellent for that.

Bye for now..............

Our Big Summer Adventure - Crossing The Wash

When we first notified our insurance company of our intention to cross The Wash they imposed specific conditions that we tape up all external vents and vulnerable windows, so apart from the scuppers, that's what we did.

All our windows have rubber seals apart from the side doors, so we taped them up too, just in case.

By 10.30 we were all assembled in Boston Grand Sluice Lock waiting for the tide to come up the river so that they could open the lock gates at both ends and let us out.

The Cotswold's Canal Cruising Club colours are orange so most of us wore something orange, even though it's not the most flattering of colour.

The guy in the front of the picture wearing the blue hat was our chief pilot Daryl and he was in the lead boat. We also a second pilot on one of the middle boats and a third on the last boat.

Everyone was chomping at the bit to get going so when the lock gates opened we made a dash for it. There was a very short window before the tide started dropping and the gates would have to be closed behind us, but we all made it through and headed off down the River Witham towards the sea.

Once past the iconic church we entered the Port of Boston where business was carrying on as usual, although many people were amazed to see 8 narrowboats whizzing past in convoy and workmen stopped to wave at us.

We felt like small fry compared to this commercial ship, even though in the scale of things it was relatively small itself.

The tide dropped fast, taking us with it out towards The Wash

past this fishing boat beached on a sand bank, it's crew busy on deck.

Lunchtime beckoned and although we'd intended having a BBQ on the beach later, we couldn't wait so had an impromptu picnic of a steak butty and a small glass of red wine - well large glass but small portion of wine.

We were second boat in the pre-arranged formation and all boats kept in constant touch with each other by VHF radio. The weather was perfect, sunny but not too hot, low speed winds and only small waves.

We'd gone out on an ebbing tide and as it dropped we started to see sand banks some of which had basking seals on them.

It took us longer to reach our own specific sand bank than had been anticipated as one of the boats kept lagging behind due to an overheating engine. Eventually we got to this buoy - RAF no. 4 and saw the emerging sand bank we were going to beach on

It had a wreck of a boat on it which became more visible as the tide dropped

We beached the boats to the left of the wreck

and all got off to set up our picnics and party. Some did it with more style and panache than others but we all had a ball.

The two dogs in the convoy got off to do what dogs do naturally. They'd both been very well behaved during the long trip and Bentley ran round like a mad thing making up for lost time. He saw a seal in water and kept trying to swim out to get it. I think he thought it was a ball as all he could see was the top of it's head.

I walked over to have a look at the wreck

and looking back towards the beached flotilla it looked like they were on a desert island

complete with palm tree and sand castles

The sand bank and wreck are markers which the RAF use during training flights and we had some wonderful displays from a jet plane doing low level passes and barrel rolls. Unfortunately it was far to fast to photograph.

Our time on the island came to a premature end when the tide started coming back in and the boats started re-floating. It wasn't a problem as we'd all put down anchors, but it was just a shame we'd arrived late and had to cut our celebrations short. We had to "stem the tide" by circling around for half an hour until the sand bank and wreck were almost totally submerged, which meant there was sufficient water in the channel for us to carry on our journey towards Wisbech.

We passed an island with more beached fishing boats

before heading into the River Nene and meeting this very fast pilot boat. The wake it made produced bigger waves than we'd had out in the Wash and it was quite bumpy for a while.

As we approached our destination the boats started getting bigger

as did their mooring fenders - tractor tyres as opposed to the go-cart tyres we use

It took us two and a half hours to get from the mouth of the Nene to our moorings at Wisbech Yacht Harbour and by that time most of us were pretty tired. While some of us decided to call it a day and stood around discussing the trip while evening meals were prepared, a couple of boat crews went to the pub.  For once we weren't amongst the pub goers!

The whole trip was just fantastic. Would I do it again? Without a doubt, although next time I'd do it from Wisbech to Boston for a change.

If you fancy making the trip yourself I'd definitely recommend doing it with a club or large group of boats. Not only do you get the craic but there's definitely safety in numbers.