Cromwell Lock

Here I am Rune

Distance 4.2 miles 

Total 4684 Locks  313 Tunnels

Running total mileage 6,861 miles

Perhaps last nights mooring was just a bit too close to the nearby sewage works, although the smell was only intermittent. It also turns out that it is the swimming hole for the local teenagers who arrived at about 4pm and stayed until it started raining, sometime about 7.00pm. In fairness they were no problem, just jumping into the river and swimming across the a very high wharf from which they jumped (the destructibility of youth!!).

 

Emptied the Elsan and quickly popped back into Newark on the bike to get some milk then pressed onto Cromwell Lock ready for tomorrow’s passage to Torksey. Seemed a lot of fishermen on the river, there was me thinking that it was supposed to be a relaxing sport, nothing like the highly irate fisherman shouting something at me as I passed. He obviously doesn’t realise that when standing on a big throbbing diesel engine it is difficult to hear whatever the comments of someone onshore about 25 metres away is saying, but it seemed to be some nonsense about how I should be keeping to the middle of the river “…not 4 feet from the riverbank…”. The fact is that I don’t suppose I ever got closer that 40 feet from the riverbank but I simply muttered something about,”Get on with drowning your worms and I’ll get on with navigating my boat if that is OK” and essentially ignored the muppet. A cruiser that arrived sometime after I’d moored at Cromwell apparently had much the same abuse on the way, how shocking can it be that on a Navigable Waterway some boats have the audacity to navigate?!!