Lurking at Zouch

4th & 5th June

We're on a very rickety connection here at Zouch (wandering from 3G to GPRS, sometimes mega fast, sometimes freezing out) so I'm going to keep this quite short.

We had a second very peaceful night at Barrow, despite the occasional noise of incoming airliners to East Mids airport, followed by a splendid run down to Loughborough, and an even better one to Zouch.

With a bit of reversing, I managed the left turn to go into the wharf at Loughborough, which has indeed been substantially redeveloped since we were last there, being now dominated by a PFI student block, but it's still worth it for the close approach to Sainsbury's. It's ironic that the development has actually made the moorings less secure, since they used to be behind a locked gate with a BW padlock, but we considered them to be so much better looking that it was worth it. We wouldn't want to stop there overnight anyway.

The cut through the town, or rather round to the east of it, is not so pretty, being a bit scruffy. I said it reminded me of Nuneaton, but Sheila thought that was too severe. Manoeuvring in the basin is a bit tricky, especially when most of the short pontoons are full, but we managed to get into one without too much hassle.

After shopping, we had a cup of coffee whilst waiting for another boat to finish on the new service block, then I took Sanity over there. Again, this was a bit trickier than it should have been, with the boat declining to behave as I expected her to. I suspect that the basin is quite shallow, so that when trying to swing the boat round, she just doesn't want to play.

That done, we set off again, and were joined in the next lock by a Rose narrowboat with Dutch hirers. They were a bit desperate to find a water point, many of the old ones having disappeared. In the end, I signalled to them to take advantage of one of the ones on the long term moorings before Bishop Meadow Lock, which they did.

(For future reference, there is in fact a proper one just above the lock.)

Then we had the best bit of boating for the day, down the beautiful river section to Zouch. We found a space on the moorings beyond the Rose and Crown and had lunch.

In the afternoon, I discovered that there were a couple of geocaches nearby, so we set off and found them both without difficulty. The route we chose took us through the village of Sutton Bonington, about 15 to 20 minutes walk away. This place has a general store and a Post Office.

This is handy, as the rain started in earnest last night, and only stopped at lunch time today. Zouch is the last good refuge from the raging waters of the Soar in flood, and after our Nene experience of the other year, we are quite cautious ("tumud" Para Handy would say) about rivers in boisterous mood.

This morning it had come up from well below the green bit of the marker to an inch onto it, about three inches in all, and by this afternoon, it had come up another four or so, to be an inch below the yellow.

If we had been heading back towards the Trent and Mersey, we'd possibly have pushed on, as it's only a half day or so from here to the safety of Shardlow, but since we're planning to go the other way, it makes sense to sit tight and see what transpires.

Knowing the Soar, it will come up a bit further and then start back down, so we'll probably have at least tomorrow here, and either set off again on Monday, or maybe Tuesday. Meanwhile, I went to the village to get a paper this morning, and we've had a pretty lazy day of it