Thrapston and EA's Visitor Mooring efforts!

Today – Moored Nine Arches Bridge, Thrapston
Yesterday – Denford to Thrapston, River Nene, 1.5 miles 1 lock

I really loved Denford and was sorry to leave, but we had to move on to collect a Tesco order and an order of coal at Thrapston yesterday.  The moorings here are not finished off properly and are desperately short.  There is room to have put in more landing stage, but they haven’t.  It’s only a small inlet as it is…..

A chap we met at Woodford Riverside Marina said that he and his friends went down there and moored 5 narrowboats before a night out in the local Woolpack Pub!  I think they must have all been 36 footers!

Anyway, on our arrival, my horror……. a man at the waterpoint, not knowing how to fix it!  I had just finished running the washing machine, and we must have been again fairly low on water as we had stayed at Denford for a week!  Here Lucy is making sure he keeps on trying to get it to flow!

It was a good job we arrived anyway…. he had no Nene key to undo the flap, so gawd knows how he was suppose to open it.  In the end two hours later he managed to get it to work!  But the flow of water was only just strong enough to run along our hose to fill the water tank…. eventually taking 5 minutes under 2 hours to do the job of filling it!

Tesco and coal arrived during that time… and we went over the lovely packet bridge to Thrapston town, only about a 5 minute walk, to find the man who fixes mowers and the like.  The chain saw had refused to fire up you see.  Vic thought that maybe a new spark plug might do the trick…. he was right too!

We spent the evening in the Woolpack Pub just across the road from the mooring here.  Nice pub actually.

We were going to move on this morning, but Vic needed to see the doc about a bit of a rash on his back that has been stubborn to go away…. and we had to wait over 2 and half hours to be seen on ‘open surgery’ morning at the local Surgery!  We were unlucky apparently.  Normally there are three docs on duty, but today only the one.

Picking up some lunch from the backers in the town, and to the Post Office for that rod licence we returned back to the boat but I didn’t feel like moving today by this time….

This afternoon I took Lucy walking beside the River in a northerly direction for a couple of miles before returning via the Nene Way… It is suddenly very noticeable that the trees have turned green…. which reminds me. 

Yesterday, sitting on the back deck waiting for Tesco, coal and the man trying to get the water going, I spied 5 house martins excitedly circling around the area here…. so that is 11th April!  Now I think that is very early to see the first house martins.  The earliest I have ever seen them before has been 1st May, and that was down south in Hampshire some years ago.