Peterborough

Andrew made a good start - the rest of us came along rather later! Another scorcher although later a light breeze came along to cool us down, but only a little.

We were booked in at Stanground for 3:30 so pushed on. We had a short stop at march - Mike to use the Sani station (at least we made one use of the special key we bought last week on arrival into the Middle Level.

Our speed was generally a lot better today and we spotted several places where water was being pumped into the levels.

We arrived at Ashline Lock - which is unattended, the only one currently self-operated on Middle Level - and we were fortunate that another boat arrived just after us to go down. The instructions are to leave the lock empty with the penstocks closed - so there is quite a delay leaving the lock even after the boat has exited. So we could leave all that to the boat going down!

We moored for lunch just above the lock - a bit of a luxury! We left again on a schedule to take us to our rendezvous with the lock keeper. Shortly afterwards Andrew successfully negotiated the tight bend at Whittlesey which in the past was an obstacle boats as long as Take Five. All along we have seen an ever-changing selection of wild flowers including Valerian growing out of a wall on this tight bend.

We did indeed arrive at Stanground about 15 minutes early. As it happened, the keeper was happy to let us straight through - when we arrived we realised that the lock was being used to run through water from the River Nene into Middle level.

Not long after leaving Stanground we stopped at the water point alongside Peterborough Embankment. After some discussion we decided what to do next: Andrew wanted to walk down to Dog-in-a-Doublet (the start of the tidal section) whilst Mike and Christine went to Asda for more supplies. We moved off the water point and tied up.

Andrew texted info on possible moorings a little downstream (away from the noise of the bypass bridge and the squeaking of the mill) so we moved down a short distance to do this and then set about the meal prep whilst Andrew returned from Dog-in-a-Doublet.