Friday 17 Aug 2012 St Ives

We left our mooring at 9.15 this morning heading along the Old west river. If I had realised how close we were to Stretham Pumping station I would have carried on to there last night for the peace and quiet. We continued past the Lazy Otter and at Twenty Pence there was a collection of EA vehicles and I guessed that they may be weed cutting, about a mile further on we came upon the these two monsters hard at work, cutting and collecting weed before jettisoning it onto the bank.

His mate was a couple of hundred meters further upstream.

Not long after this I had three large cruisers catching me up so I pulled over to let them pass. One of them was still on the lock mooring at Hermitage when we arrived and I thought he was waiting for the lock when actually he had lost his his hydraulic fluid from his gearbox due to overheating  in the floating weed. The only thing enjoying this weed is the Swans and I don’t think there are enough of them to make an impact.
Above Hermitage lock we saw the other two cruisers who were about to set off and they passed us while we were stopped at Westview Marina for a pump out. While we were pumping out I spotted this chap on the far bank, as you can see there is still quite a bit of water about.
I was a bit worried how I was going to get away from the service pontoon as it was a lee shore with a 25 mph wind square on the side, but by the time we had finished it had moderated a bit and we were soon on our way. We caught the two cruisers up at Brownshills Lock where we talked about the weed problems they had had with raw water cooling.
After they had gone I turned the lock and we had another large cruiser come up who shared the lock with us, he had also had a lot of cooling problems due to the weed.
Outside the pub at Holywell there was a lorry with 3 boats on the back, a bit of Googling shows that is where they are based.

A little further on we spotted this Landrover and trailer on the river bank. It belongs to a company called Rushmaters http://www.rushmatters.co.uk/ a little further on and we would meet three of their punts loaded with rushes one with a dog keeping an eye on thing.

It was not long before we were at St Ives lock, we had to wait as there were a couple of boats ahead going up and one waiting to come down. I thought I would take another couple of photos showing the kink that restricts the size of boats that can enter the lock.

 

 

 

Once clear of the lock we continued into the town, we spotted that there was a good length of vacant visitor moorings in the cut by The Dolphin so we slid in only to find that if the bow was near the bank no one else would be able to get in or out past our stern, so we backed out and went looking for deeper water which we found behind the island called “The Waits”