Bidding Bedford Goodbye
It was disappointing to conclude that one afternoon of Bedford was enough. We had rather imagined spending at least a couple of days here, as one of the highlights of our summer cruise but nothing we had seen encouraged us to stay and explore further. We were awoken early in the morning by a loud bubbling and rocking under the boat. Having quickly dressed and gone outside to investigate I found that there was a jet of water or air discharging against the lower hull, although there was no sign of a pipe or outflow. It stopped a few minutes later with no harm done but it only reinforced our decision to move on as quickly as possible.
Without the link to Milton Keynes there was no choice but to retrace our steps back down the Great Ouse and eventually right back up to Northampton, the way we had come. Many of the stops would be the same, although we still had Cambridge to explore before heading back across the Middle Levels. For tonight, we negotiated the lock and returned to Great Barford, where we treated ourselves to a meal in the pub.
Before dinner I did go out and explore Great Barford itself a little more. Essentially, The Green, with the bridge, the pub and the slipway, is what it is all about. The church lies behind the pub but beyond that is a matrix of housing, much of it fairly modern, grown up around a few farms whose buildings now sit in the middle of the estates. The Green, however, was busier than ever, well into the evening, with individuals and groups swimming, paddling or just relaxing on the grass.
St. Neots Revisited
To be able to fill up with water the next morning we had to pull the boat back across the slipway. No sooner had we done so than two wild swimmers emerged from under the bridge wanting to use the slipway to get out. To be fair, they weren't that wild, just a bit nervous, until we could push the boat away from the bank and assure them they were safe to come past.
It was a dry day with some sun coming out in the afternoon and we had a good run down to St. Neots, stopping off at Eaton Socon to raid the Tesco Extra we had skipped on the way down. The lock at Eaton Socon has a landing stage that is actually past the lock entrance, which is unexpected if you haven't been paying attention and makes it awkward to get back and into the lock once it is open. I chose to turn the boat so it was facing back towards the lock entrance. Once I had the lock ready and Sue came to turn it in to the lock she found it really wasn't the best idea so she had to turn it round again to find a decent line of approach. Not quite as simple as it sounds in a rather cramped pound.
At St. Neots we could see the murals painted on either side of the bridge. This still seems to be a surprisingly effective way of deterring the worst efforts of would-be graffiti artists, as well as brightening the structure up. We could also see, through the bridge itself, that the pontoon below the bridge was empty on a Thursday afternoon, so we were able avoid the tree and go straight on to the far end to moor for the night.
A little later narrowboat "Bob" appeared, bearing down on the space along the pontoon just ahead of us. As it swooped in we saw something fall from the roof into the water. It turned out to be his boat pole, one end of which was then bobbing on the surface while the hook weighed the other end down. The driver had noticed, so he cut the engine revs and began to reverse, somewhat to the confusion of the lady in the bows, who had been standing, rope in hand, ready to disembark on the pontoon. The backing up seemed to go quite smoothly but the retrieval was slightly hampered by the fact that the tool you might usually use for this exercise was the item that needed to be retrieved. He got hold of it in the end and got it back on board before coming back in, rather more slowly, to moor ahead of us. We watched all of this with interest, not just for the entertainment and schadenfreude but because there was absolutely nothing we could realistically do to help. He told us that they had been slightly grounded earlier. They had had to use the pole to push off and then just put it on the gunwale as they moved on. An object lesson for us in the importance of returning everything to its proper place!
Locked Out
Leaving St. Neots on Friday morning we headed back down, passing through Offord Lock and past the marina with the world's shortest diesel hose. Further downstream we went under the newly constructed bridge carrying the rerouted A14 Huntingdon Bypass. Apparently it is constructed of white concrete and self-coloured steel. One might be forgiven for wondering if 'self-coloured' was another word for rusty. If that were our hull I would be reaching for the Fertan rust converter!
The Huge New A14 Bridge At Offord - Self-Coloured In A Fetching Shade of Oxidisation
At Brampton Lock we encountered a bit of a queue. The lock had been reported as malfunctioning the day before but had then been sorted. Now, it seemed, it was broken again. We managed to get tied up behind another boat on the landing and I went to join the little knot of boaters gathered around the control box. There were boats stuck going up and down so there were four or five people already there. Listening to their accounts of what was happening it was pretty clear that they had applied the usual approach of pushing each button on the control panel, in increasingly random order, multiple times and were now at the point where, as a last resort, they were reading the instructions. We agreed that if we followed the directions to reset the control sequence and then pushed nothing else for a few minutes it would give any built-in delay a chance to elapse. In the meantime, one of them opened a second front by contacting the EA to report the problem, another approach clearly regarded as a last ditch admission of failure, rather than an obvious, routine course of action.
I must admit that, like the rest of them, I didn't think the response from the EA would happen very quickly, especially as they were forced to leave a voicemail rather than speak to someone directly. It was quite a surprise, then, when someone in EA uniform came strolling over the lock about five minutes later. Less of a surprise when we realised that there was an EA office just by Brampton Mill.
Apparently, the bottom gates had been badly damaged in a careless collision recently. Divers had had to be brought in to help repair the damage but since then, there had been intermittent issues with the sensor on the gates that signals to the control unit that the gates are fully closed and the lock can be allowed to fill. Yesterday they had employed the expert technique of standing on the middle of the gates and jumping up and down to trigger the sensor. Today, however, this was unsuccessful and he announced that he would have to deploy the "lockkeeper's finger". This involved unlocking the control cabinet, overriding all the safety controls and then pressing the button to empty the lock. Having cycled through once, the lock then began working normally again, for now. The divers were due back on Monday to try and adjust the sensor but I suspect the lockkeeper was in for a busy weekend.
Homecoming
As we passed Godmanchester by on the way up, we were keen to visit there on the return trip. Just before Godmanchester Lock there is a channel to the right that leads around a park and down to a wide but shallow pool above the weir, with the shops along The Causeway facing the pool. The park, itself, is reached via the famous Chinese Bridge. There is mooring for just about one boat by the lock. The only other moorings are further down the channel, against the bank alongside the park.
The Great Ouse At Godmanchester
On this Friday afternoon the lock berth was already occupied, so we tried heading down the channel. By the time we were about half way down we were able to see that that, too, was full. We decided to reverse out, although it was quite a long way by then, which went surprisingly well. We were just backing up a bit further, to be able to turn into the lock, when we realised that, now, a boat was coming up towards us out of the channel. "Ladybird" appeared to be some sort of charity trip boat for the elderly and had only stopped there for an hour or so in the afternoon. We let her pass and then headed back down again to moor up in her place.
We reached the area signed as "Town Moorings", just three or four boat lengths of scrubby bank that was completely overgrown with long dried grass, nettles and brambles and with no means of securing mooring lines. The rest of the park area is very well maintained with manicured lawns and not a weed in sight. It is a bit baffling that they seem to deliberately leave the mooring area to grow wild. Avoiding the wasp nest beside us, we managed to get ashore, bang in some pins and drag out the gangplank to help us get on and off. We had arrived, now the only gnawing concern was how we would get out tomorrow. It was a lot further, now, to reverse out, to the point where that would be rather impractical. The river here was a little too narrow to turn comfortably and we knew that the pool above the weir at the end was only half the size it looked as most of it was very shallow. Already we were starting to regret not having dealt with this before we moored, rather than leaving it to fester until the morning.
We managed to have a good look around most of Godmanchester. Much had changed and most of it for the better, by and large. There were a few new developments but the town's position in relation to the water table meant that most of that was planned or had already been completed when we had left. There is very little scope for large new schemes. The old Town Hall and the Grade II listed Queen Elizabeth Grammar School in the New Court beside the Chinese Bridge appear to have had cleaning and repair work since we last saw them and there are several amenities, both on the recreation grounds and in the town, that were not there then.
Much Improved Recreation Area Across The Famous Chinese Bridge
One thing I realised as we walked around was that I had had no idea that half of the little town existed. The area around our house was familiar and the popular route down to the Causeway and up to Post Street. As we walked behind the Black Bull, behind the church and across to The White Hart I could see that much of the housing and amenities had been there for a long time but I didn't really recognise them at all. To Sue they were much more familiar and we realised that this wasn't just a result of failing memory. While Sue had spent plenty of time walking around the town while she was at home with Nick and then Jenny, I had mostly been at work or on the commute to and from London. In the daylight, when I was home at the weekends, we were far more likely to take the car and go farther afield for a walk rather than explore the back streets of Godmanchester itself.
The following morning we opted to go down and turn at The Causeway. It turned out to be fairly straightforward, as did the reverse turn into the lock at the top of the channel, so not worth losing sleep over after all. It was busy, however, on a Saturday morning and it stayed quite busy all day. We headed back down through Huntingdon and Houghton Lock.
No Room At The Inn
At Hemingford Lock a fifty foot narrowboat called "Otter" arrived and joined us in the lock. As we were emptying the chamber a third boat appeared behind us and its owner came over. I thought he might be about to complain that we hadn't waited for him, although there was no way we could have seen him coming from the lock side. However, he actually wanted to see if either of us had a windlass we could spare as he had just dropped his in the water and had only had that one on board. Without it he could neither proceed down this and subsequent locks nor pass back through Houghton and return to his own mooring. He could probably have waited at each lock until someone else who had a windlass came along to accompany him but that is not a good place to be. Today, he was in luck as we had inherited a couple of old aluminium windlasses with our first boat and I had kept them in the bottom of the locker, just in case. I let him have one of those and we got on our way past the Hemingfords and through St. Ives.
As we approached St. Ives lock, with "Otter" following behind, a cruiser started to emerge from a marina called Jones Boatyard on our right. We gave the usual blast on the horn to warn him that there was traffic already coming down but that was ignored completely and they just shot out right in front of us. He was fast enough to avoid a collision and turn back in to the lock landing just beyond the entrance he had left but of course, there was little room for us and none for the boat behind. We managed to get the front of our boat tied on to the lock landing and we were able to invite "Otter" to breast up alongside us.
This is rather like someone stealing your space in the supermarket car park, quite trivial in the grand scheme of things but with the potential to generate a disproportionate level of annoyance. Shouting and complaining about it was never going to make any difference and the driver of the cruiser showed no sign of remorse but did his best to ignore us. However, there were about five small boats getting in a tangle below the lock and taking an age to sort themselves out. As the minutes ticked by he came over and made an exaggerated effort to be friendly and work out how all of us could get into the lock together, in what order. Perhaps his conscience was pricking him after all?
While the boats below gradually sorted themselves out and filled the lock a couple more boats arrived with nowhere to wait. They were hovering behind us ready to come into the landing. Life became more complicated when the lock opened, to disgorge the boats coming up, which included two day boats hired between them by a large party of Eastern Europeans who were clearly in party mood but had left some of their crew behind at the lock. Eventually, we invited the accidental castaways to climb across our deck while their boats circled round to collect them and finally head upstream with much whooping and yahooing. At last we could all move into the lock and those still hovering in the open water could move onto the landing behind us.
One possible mooring for the night was the Pike & Eel at Needingworth but we had discovered, over breakfast, that there was a music festival on in Needingworth this weekend. There were a number of posts on social media encouraging local boaters to get down there and meet up. As we didn't want to arrive there and have to move on, late in the afternoon, we were going to aim to moor before we reached there, by the Ferry Boat Inn at Holywell.
While the prolonged mayhem at the lock steadily unfolded we chatted to the crew of "Otter" and learned that the guy at the tiller was heading to Needingworth with his guitar to join his band for a set later in the afternoon. As we were a longer boat we took position in the recessed cut-out of the D-shaped lock and were, therefore, last out. As we approached the Ferry Boat we could see there was no space on their mooring so we cruised past to try a Great Ouse Boating Association site in the field beyond. It was there alright but very limited with a high bank that was rather overgrown and very uneven, requiring the gangplank to be deployed again. It also turned out to be very shallow, which limited the usable space even more. We were surprised to see "Otter" pulling in there ahead of us and feared we might not get in ourselves but they were really helpful. Seeing us arriving they took a line and moved their own boat back a bit so we could both moor up. It turned out that they had a car parked nearby to get them to Needingworth as they had had the same misgivings as we had about getting a berth at the Pike & Eel.
Ferry Boat Inn, Holywell Photo © John Sutton (cc-by-sa/2.0)
Reviewing our situation during the afternoon it seemed quite curious. Between the large field beside the river and the pub was a small channel, lined and covered with trees and hedgerow, with no bridge, making the direct route of a hundred yards or so impractical. Following the channel inland to the top of the field brought me to a gate out onto a bridleway that ran parallel to the river and emerged at the Ferry Boat garden, about twenty yards beyond this gate. Unfortunately, the gate was firmly locked and there was no stile or squeeze to get out onto the bridleway. A quick recce further along the field showed no obvious way out, leaving me no choice but to vault the gate. Well, a few years ago it might have been a gate vault. Today I went for the undignified scramble. In setting up a mooring site so close to a pub it seems a real shame that the GOBA hadn't been able to negotiate a route out of the field. How many boaters are likely to moor there and expect to just stay on their boat for forty-eight hours?
I carried on round to the pub entrance to find out what their arrangements were if we wanted to visit that evening. They were fully booked, it seemed, if we had hoped to eat there. I asked if we could just come and have a drink? After some hesitation they said yes, provided there was space at the time. Their best offer was that, if I called them ten minutes or so before we wanted to come over, they would then tell us if they had a space and keep it for us for that long. Not quite the casual, drop-in local of pre-COVID days. I thanked them, took my leave and reported back to the boat. As I had rather suspected, Sue decided that a tramp across a damp field, scrambling over a five-barred gate and up a bridleway track to a pub that seemed to be standing-room only, if at all, was not that appealing, so we opted for a quiet night in.