After the trip along the Relief Channel it was back to Denver.     Here the boats and boaters would need to wait for suitable water depth to transit from the non-tidal Ouse down a tidal river stretch and lock up onto the Middle Levels. Denver is a superb place to play a waiting game. There is wide water with plenty of mooring space on both sides.     You feel you can breathe deeply here as there is so much open...

From the narrow twisty River Wissey     – to the broad man-made Relief Channel.  On Saturday Tentatrice and Cleddau left their Wissey moorings, cruised the short distance further north to Denver – and bore right at the Denver Sailing Club to access the Relief Channel Navigation.  After the devastating North Sea floods that overwhelmed many East Coast communities in 1953 improvements to river flood banks were made and new infrastructure was constructed to prevent a recurrence of flooding on such...

The River Wissey is another so far unexplored East Anglian river. Like the Lark  and Brandon Creek  the Wissey feeds into the Great Ouse. “While we’re here shall we explore the little rivers?” the Tentatrice First Mate had suggested.  Boatwif wouldn’t admit to a Tick List syndrome – but there is a chart on her computer of waterways so far explored – and this year the Cam, the Little Ouse and now the Wissey have been added to the “Boated”...

9 miles from Ely along the Great Ouse is The Ship Inn – it sits at the mouth of the Little Ouse River, often referred to as Brandon Creek.  The little convoy (Cleddau and Tentatrice) regrouped as travelling partners at Littleport on Monday morning      and set off to explore another previously unvisited East Anglian waterway.  To turn onto a river about a third of the width of the Great Ouse came as rather a shock,    especially as the...

To be bored in Ely is to be bored with life… that was the gist of a conversation with an Ely local a few weeks ago. With this last weekend in Ely full of sound and colour, there was little chance of being bored.  Cleddau was moored alongside the Riverside Park,  a few hundred metres from Jubilee Gardens, the ‘bandstand park’. Quite early on Saturday morning the boom of a public address system, songs and a rhythmic beat indicated that...

There was time to squeeze in one last little boat trip before the Cal Clan flew back to the US. But where to? From Ely, heading north, it’s a lock-free 16 mile straight wide trip out to Denver. A return to Pope’s Corner (south bound) could lead to a trip along the green weed-choked Old West River – or there was the river route from Pope’s Corner towards Cambridge. The latter option won the day, after all there are two...

29th July – 1st August Cleddau had arrived in Ely on a Sunday. Unusually, especially on a summer weekend, there were plenty of mooring spaces. Where were the gleaming white cruisers that cluster in front of the restaurants and along the waterfront? Maybe Friday’s tempest and Saturday’s gales had deterred the usual flotillas… The boat was tied up at about midday far enough away from any potential pub noise – and a mere few paces from the Jubilee Gardens. At...

Remember that one hoot of the horn?  (See end of previous post). It indicated Cleddau’s turn to the right, a right turn on hitherto unexplored waters. First impressions of the River Cam were of a total contrast from the Old West River: the Cam is wide,    it feels deep, in many places there are shady trees on the eastern bank – and the 7mph limit provides real speed opportunities after the snail’s pace of the Old West…  There are...

The return journey from Bedford to Cheshire has started. The route has been covered twice before of course, in 2010  and in 2014 . From Bedford to Denver Sluice it would be downstream all the way. However often you travel the same waterway no cruise is ever the same as the ones that have gone before: lock companions change, water levels change, waterway surroundings change… The first couple of miles from Priory Marina (Wednesday 18th July) took an inordinately long...

It was a date agreed four years ago: “Let’s do it again,” the Tentatrice crew had said, “let’s go back to the Bedford River Festival in 2018.” And so it was. After a winter of route planning, a spring of impatience awaiting Cleddau’s release from the Nantwich paint shed, after a summer of creating broom handle flag poles, after 353 miles, 110 locks, 8 waterways and a sea crossing, Cleddau eventually reached the site of the 2018 Bedford River Festival. ...