Random Writings

This morning was very productive. I reviewed some work I’d done in my first year, noted that it looked a bit shabby and poorly researched with the benefit of two years’ hindsight, and began to re-write and improve it, adding extra references to remove the Aunt Jobisca-ish nature of some of the assertions.

Incidentally, my search for Aunt Jobisca turns up that the biologist JBS Haldane first took the character of Aunt Jobisca away from the Pobble losing his toes and applied her more generally to people who make statements unsupported by facts…

Having written 700 words or so and dug up at least half a dozen new references (how I love the combination of mobile broadband and online journal archives!) I stopped for lunch. After a sandwich or two and a cup of tea, my attention was turned to the shower head. For the last week or so – since I changed the water pump, in fact – it’s been difficult to get the shower to the right temperature. I was blaming the water pump, but knew that in theory it was a similar capacity to the old one. Anyway, I realised during this morning’s alternately too hot and too cold shower that there wasn’t a sufficient flow of water coming through the shower head for the water heater to work properly. A proper look at the shower head with my glasses on revealed it to be somewhat bunged up, and after breakfast I’d dumped it in a mug of clear vinegar to remove the limescale. After lunch, rinsed and with a few holes unblocked with a pin, it worked much better!

Buoyed by my success, I decided to embark on the ten mile journey to Denver Sluice. My start-up ritual involves checking the engine oil and coolant levels, as Innocenti usually leaks both these vital fluids a little bit. I was somewhat surprised to find that the oil level had dropped substantially (all the more surprising given that it had been fine at lunchtime on Day 2), but I decided to top up and press on, watching the oil pressure gauge like a hawk. An hour in, and it had dropped about 0.5 bar. I stopped on a convenient and empty public mooring and checked the dipstick – seemed okay. Checking the oil when the engine is warm gives a different level anyway as the oil expands.
I continued to Denver. This section of the river is known as the Ten Mile Bank – the river is higher than the land here, and so is hemmed in by a high flood bank that runs the full ten miles to Denver. You see nothing! I passed two boats coming the other way – all in all, a very boring afternoon on the river. This being the Fens, it was windy, and it seemed to be getting increasingly cold, too.

I arrived at Denver just before 5, relieved to have arrived without engine drama and rather looking forward to a hot cup of tea. The increasingly useless Imray guidebook to the Great Ouse led me to believe that there’s a water point adjacent to the Jenyn’s Arms pub right by the main sluice. There isn’t – and nor is there a 48hr mooring at present, as the bank has subsided so it’s fenced off! I turned around and moored a few hundred metres upstream on another 48hr spot and got my cup of tea.
Afterwards, I went for a wander round the site and looked for the other water point in the guidebook – which was shown as adjacent to another sluice, behind the sailing club. I did find the water point, and it turned out also to have a free pump-out that the guidebook didn’t mention.

Denver is a strange sort of place. Seven different watercourses come together here, all of them wholly or partially artificial, and the complex has been evolving continuously for 350 years. The main sluice still stands where Cornelius Vermuyden built it to keep the tides out of the Fens in the 1651, although it’s been subsequently rebuilt several times and the present incarnation is Victorian with 1950s additions.
In 1964 the second part of the Denver complex opened – the AG Wright sluice – which together with two new river channels (imaginatively called the Relief Channel and the Cut-off Channel) seem to have finally resolved the many issues with flooding and silting which plagued Denver and the south Fens since the drainage began 400 years ago! The whole aspect of the place is very strange – the grassy banks and trees seem very pleasant, but the strange green machinery of the sluices outlined against the grey sky give the place a forbidding air.

After dinner, I motored Innocenti round to the water point and filled the fresh tank while emptying the sewage. While waiting for the freshwater tank to fill, I had a poke about in the engine bay and found what I hope was the source of the oil leak. Like many boats, Innocenti has a little hand-pump connected to the oil sump so that you can change the oil by pumping it out – unlike a car, where you can get a drainer can underneath it and let it out by gravity. This pump connects to where the drain plug would have been if the engine had been in a car via a length of flexible hose. I’ve had trouble with it leaking before at the engine block end, but this time I found that it was leaking from where it joins the bottom of the brass pump – a turn or two with the Big Spanner and it should be good.

Tomorrow involves an early start to the cruise – the next 1/2 mile from Denver Sluice to Salter’s Lode Lock is along the tidal Great Ouse, and so I must wait for tomorrow’s high tide. At 8am we shall be off into the Middle Levels to the town of March.

Day 3: Littleport to Denver – 10 miles and no locks.
Total so far: 32 miles and 2 locks. Thesis 717 words, 4 pages.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 26th, 2010 at 9:26 pm and is filed under Narrowboat.