sweeping bends, lovely views and Ermintrude at the beach !

These were the lovely dutch barges, one supposedly belonging to that lord.

Stopped the night outside The Bromley Arms. Very good food, and busy. Also some folkies on their way home from a festival popped in for a pint and gave us a few tunes.

So onwards to Newark on Trent, we stopped for a beer and a chat with "Cuddly"Ken & Sheila cruising on their boat NB Largomente. They are our new neighbours at Floods Ferry( perhaps the reason we ended up buying , as they seem so happy there ). They have done the tidal Great Ouse, but found it a bit daunting, as there are so many tree trunks and dead cow to look out for.

We had planned to do this, but with the spring tides, you cant make a start until 17th August. Bit late for us, as we want to get to Skipton and then make our way back very slowly.

Again Newark on Trent will be explored more thorughly on our homeward journey.

Arrived Cromwell L ock, and the previous post should have been here. How tragic about all those sappers. the oldest being 29 yrs and the youngest 17.

This is the weir.

The blog just went a bit haywire so everything has gone back to front.

So , Our plans for doing the tidal trent were naff.So the Locky suggested that we do his plan to do the tidal trent, and that sounded a lot better. We left Cromwell Lock and headed for Torksey( very, very pretty). Great trip, weather gorgeous. We have to steer clear of the 600ton gravel barges, various sunken islands,( we found a small sunken atholl, but Cap'n Mick got us off), and the shallows as you go around the sweeping bends.

leaving Cromwell Lock

The Tidal Trent is great. sea birds, lovely views, but we have had superb weather, if it was raining perhaps not so good. but how about this : a beachful of beauties !!!!!

We couldn't stop laughing at the cows at the beach.

TORKSEY !

Very pretty. Nice and helpful lock keeper, and we need a pump-out. So the DIY BW pump-out is broke and there is no money to fix it. Locky informed us that he would do it for us, but first we had to go halfway into the lock, he arrived with his portable pump-out machine. to do the business, so to speak. Anyway, this is a great place for gongoozlers, and of course, they thought there was going to be some major locking going on. I had to politley inform them that , in fact, it was major pumping out going on. They were a bit disappointed,and some of the kids went running off crying " pooh pooh". Charming. Well, the pump out was weak, and we didn;t get it all out and we had paid for it, so he gave us a BW pump out card to be used at a latder date, so not so bad.

Right, 2 episodes of Benidorm coming up., on ITV 4, its raining, I am off

Keadby tomorrow, that could be interesting, as we will,be going WITH the tide. fast !

Views lovely and quite surreal. such as this: