Denver Sat 24 Aug 2013

During the night the rain started, It was warm when we went to bed so we left the engine room doors open and also the back cabin slid, so that was a little job that needed attending to.
When we woke this morning it was still raining but eased off about ten. The.water tank was just about empty and at times the pump was sucking air. The water point is right against the bridge so I had to join two hoses together to reach our filler point.
The moorings are a nice straight quay edge but there are only a couple of rings, one by the bridge and one 70ft away from it, but someone has driven in a couple of large poles for mooring, it still makes it difficult to use the moorings efficiently.

We set off at 1130, I have never seen so many people fishing off their boat as there was along this stretch, some of them were sitting on their decks in the drizzle but others were inside the cockpits fishing out through the side doors sitting in the dry.

As we approached the sugarbeet factory at Wissington a Heron was standing like a weather vain on top of the old pumping station. We carried on upstream past the sugarbeet factory to wind just above the B1160 road bridge. At this point I had to put a coat on as the fine warm drizzle increased to rain. As we made our way back through Hilgay they were still all busy fishing but not catching much. Just below the Hilgay road bridge this little chap looked out to say hello as we passed. Back on the Gt Ouse we turned left to moor for a while at Hilgay Bridge EA moorings, there was only one other boat there and we use to moor next to them when we were at Floods Ferry so we spent a bit of time catching up on fellow moorers. The are crossing from Denver to Salters tomorrow so we said good by and they headed off to Denver for the night. Shortly after they had left we heard from Gwen who would be joining us for the weekend. he was running a bit late so they would meet us at Denver, so we untied and headed towards Denver.
On the way we passed mother Grebe with 4 good sized youngsters. I think this is the largest family I have come across.

We arrived at Denver the same time as our friends from Floods ferry but unfortunately we were a couple of minutes behind another narrow boat, a couple of minutes earlier and we would also have had a bank side mooring, but now we are laying outside “Carpe Diem” for the night.