Onto the Nene at last

Wednesday 18 July

After a peaceful night we pottered round to Stowe Hill for water, and then chugged on to Gayton Junction in unexciting but OK weather. On the way, Sheila, who was being lookout in the bow, suddenly became very excited and started shouting at me. I frantically scanned the cut ahead and behind, then looked about for an unusual bird, but there was nothing to be seen.

Eventually, she gave up shouting and came back to the stern, saying “It was a pigeon!!”

I must admit to some alarm at this point. We’ve had this running gag for a bit about half-seeing a strange bird, only to discover that it’s a pigeon, but this seemed a bit over the top. I mean, the poor woman’s got enough to cope with boating with me at the best of times, and I know she’s quite worried about the Nene – had she finally cracked? It turned out that what she’d seen was a pigeon land on the water and then take off again. I really didn’t know pigeons could swim.

As we arrived at Gayton (where we planned to moor either on the little bit of visitor mooring on the mainline opposite the junction, or just a little way down the Arm), it started to rain in earnest. The VM was full, so I made the turn, and in an increasing downpour, boated through the first bridge (number 2: why?) and found some unoccupied Armco piling just the other side of it. We tied with water streaming down our faces, and tumbled inside.

We got lunch, and the rain promptly stopped. However, it seemed an OK mooring, so we decided to stick there for the night. After lunch it became quite sunny once more. This is really getting to be Hebridean weather (if you don’t like it, wait half an hour).

Taking advantage of the sun, I rigged our anchor ready for river cruising, and took off the bow mooring line and the starboard centre line and washed them. We have two sets of three mooring lines, a synthetic hemp set that looks very trad, and a polyprop set in dark blue to match the boat. We’ve taken to using the hemp ones bow and stern, and two of the blue ones as centrelines, running back to the steerer on port and starboard sides of the roof. This means that we have two spares, and in an ideal world we’d rotate them all every six months. It’s been a while since we did that, but better late than never.

I put the newly washed lines out on the roof to dry. It was sunny enough to sit out on the towpath into the evening; all in all a great finish to the day. Tomorrow we go down the 17 locks of the Northampton Arm, and onto the river.


Thursday 19 July

For some reason, we both had a really bad night. I think Sheila was worrying about the state we’d find the river in, and I woke in the small hours convinced someone was trying to nick the mooring lines off the roof. I hadn’t any good reason to think this – the mooring seemed perfectly quiet in terms of passers by, though traffic noise from the A45 nearby was quite tedious. We’d also decided to make an early start, and that is never conducive to a good night’s sleep.

We gave up the pretence at 6.30, had a quick breakfast and were on our way by 7. As I said above, there are 17 locks in the flight, of which 12 are close together (the thick) and the rest spaced out rather more as you approach Northampton. I got the bike out, and we settled to our routine. The locks were against us, so it goes like this:

Lockwheeler (L) goes ahead on bike to the lock below and starts it filling. Meanwhile, Steerer (S) boats into the lock above, shuts the top gate, drops the offside paddle, and draws the bottom paddles. When the lock is empty, she drops one paddle, walks across into the middle of the two gates, and back kicks open the gate with the closed paddle. Then she gets off on the other side of the lock, opens the other gate and drops its paddle. Getting back onto the boat via the roof, she boats out and into the lock below, which is now ready, L having opened its top gate and dropped the nearside paddle.

L meanwhile bikes back up to the lock above and shuts the bottom gates. He then bikes right past the lock below to the lock below that and the whole routine starts again. As we worked down, it became apparent that we were following another boat. This turned out to be Heron, whose steerer was single handing. After five locks we’d changed over, so that Sheila was lockwheeling and I was steering. She told the guy on Heron not to worry about shutting the bottom gates as he went out, thereby saving himself some time. Most of the time she was catching him up before he got out of the lock anyway.

We changed places again at Lock 10, and I did the rest, though as they started to space out it stopped being any use using the bike. The towpath was too grassy and hummocky for any decent speed, and the locks were too far apart to ride to and fro between them any way.

At 10.50 we left the Arm and joined the river, leaving BW water for the first time since the 7th of September last year, when we left the Thames for the Oxford Canal. We stopped on the moorings in the middle of Northampton, and did a mega shop in the Morrison’s nearby. Then we worked down the first three river locks – Town, Rush Mills and Abington – and moored on the floating pontoon moorings near Weston Favell.

Witchboy was there already, on her way up river from her home on the Middle Level. It was another lovely afternoon, becoming very hot. We took a walk to the main basin of the Washlands (part of the Northampton flood protection scheme). We saw lapwing, tern and cormorant, together with greylag and Canada goose and a family of grebe in the weir stream of the main sluice. The river seems a bit higher than last year, but with very little flow. We must just wait and see what happens tomorrow, when some quite dirty weather is forecast.