Saturday 17th May 2025
March to Salters Lode
After a quiet and comfortable night, today's planned departure was delayed, a call to the hire base instigated and Engineer visit to us at Library mooring in order to sort the TV - by fitting a replacement! A speedy and effective reaction - excellent. Brenda spent the time visiting the Saturday market in town followed by her favourite passtime - charity shop cruising.
We finally set off, after visiting the water point opposite our mooring. Places to top up the water tank appear to be few and far between so we decided to use everyone we found - just incase. We then set off towards today's destination - Salters Lode lock.
The first thing we passed was an array (what is the collective noun?) of tall wind generators, one of which was not turning and looked very dark compared to the rest. As we got closer we could see that it had obviously had a fire. Research on tinternetweb revealed that it had caught fire on 2nd February 2025 and burnt itself out. See BBC report at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0rq4yqe4z4o
Next we arrived at Upwell Lock, one of three we will pass through during our planned trip. These Middle Level locks have hydraulic paddles on the bottom gates that require an awful lots of turns using the long throw windlass supplied. Boy, was that hard work. Not because of the paddle resistance but just the number of turns needed. Graham decided to just use the paddles on one side of the lock and suffering a slightly longer passage time. The ground paddles above the lock are on vertical threaded shafts which also need a lot of turns but this time on the horizontal plane. Passing through the lock was a good upper body workout.
Once through, we continued on through Upwell and Outwell, two setlements that appear to merge together. There are some fine building either side of the cut of various ages. One had obviously started life as a windmill but has had the top removed.
One of the linear moorings near a house had a novel bear model on their pontoon - I've never seen one of those before. Then about 6 moorings further on there was another. Must be a local artist.
We finally arrived at Salters Lode lock at 4:30 pm, where we winded and moored up for the night. We have no plans to make the crossing to Denver Sluice as we want to explore the Middle Levels - we'll save the Great Ouse collective for another trip. There were two boats waiting to cross, the skippers told me they would move off at about 10am tomorrow.
G & B
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