Wednesday 21 March 2012 The Ship, Brandon Creek

If you moor on the GOBA moorings at Stretham the house opposite sells eggs, honey both set and runny as well as wooden bird nesting boxes.

When I looked out this morning I was somewhat surprised to see the river running in the wrong direction, i.e. the flow was going upstream, only slowly, but definitely flowing the wrong way.

Diana decided that she would walk to Popes corner and meet me at the visitor moorings there. I passed a moored boat that still had a BCF fire extinguisher in the cockpit. My understanding is that these are now illegal so I wonder how he gets on with his BSS if he has one. In my opinion they are still the best fire extinguishers ever made.

I picked Diana up as arranged easily keeping pace with her on the river. As we approached the junction we met a cruiser, the first boat we have met for 3 days and right on the junction the EA have started maintenance work. The yellow container on the back of the pontoon is their welfare unit and contains some domestic goodies.

By now the sun was well out and with very little wind we were enjoying our trip on this wide stretch of river. The normal wind conditions in the area can be seen from the electricity poles.

As we approached Ely we could see that the traffic on the A142 road bridge entering the town was at a standstill and had been for some little while.
We moored just beyond the bridge we moored up to visit Tesco which is less than 5 minutes away behind the railway station.
The cause of the traffic holdup was also evident, the level crossing had failed preventing the higher vehicles avoiding the low tunnel under the railway crossing the line. This had also blocked the cars from using the tunnel as they could not see to pass the lorries.
When we returned from Tesco things had improved with Rail staff manually raising and lowering the barriers, but this resulted in about 4 lorries getting over between the trains. We moved on into town to fill with water and here the waterway traffic started to pick up and we probably saw 8 boats on the move during the afternoon.

EA were still working at the entrance to the River Lark and just down the Lark they were in the process of loading a digger onto a pontoon. They were ferrying bits and pieces about in a barge being pushed by a small tug fitted with a large outboard motor which didn’t seam overly efficient for the job.

From here it was not far to our overnight moorings on the EA visitor moorings outside The Ship Inn where we plan to eat tonight.