Introduction
It was all Dan Smith’s fault. He suggested a meander along the Great Ouse and Cam, starting at Bedford and finishing at Cambridge. Dan went on a reccy with Ricardo and Captain Black, and found all the launch points, hotels and pubs needed for big group of thirsty skiffers.
Dan’s plan was like Operation Overlord for Skiffs, a beautifully detailed itinerary for four days of travelling and rowing. It also contained nuggets of useful information to toss into dinner party conversation; “Did you know that Persian Bishop Ivo died in Slepe which means muddy in Saxon? “. You should try that, guests will be phoning an Uber in seconds and leave you some of the Port.
Wednesday 22nd May
On Wednesday evening before the meander we got the SRA trailer loaded up with six double skiffs. This is a difficult and precise operation because they only just fit. You can barely get a Rizla paper between the boats, believe me, Ricardo has tried. Three skiffs are loaded the right way up on one side, and three upside-down on the other side. They are stacked from the top level down, which means that a heavy (and valuable) skiff has to be lifted six feet into the air and then laid down at the correct angle so the tholes don’t hit each other. Tall men are very much in demand in that situation. It’s nice to be popular.
We got the boats interwoven and then lashed them as tightly as possible to the trailer. Roger Haines is the Lord of Straps, and a Master of Skiff Bondage and Stowage. He will be towing the trailer with his mighty Land Rover Defender up the motorway, and definitely doesn’t want an “Oh Shit” moment on the M25.
Friday 24th May
We all arrived at the Skiff Club at 5.30 am, bleary-eyed and laden down with bright orange wet bags and our second-best rucksacks. Meanders are always a logistical challenge, and this was even more so because there are twenty-six people involved. A hired mini-bus took sixteen people, Dom and Ricardo took a carload each, and Roger drove the Land Rover (with kayaks on the roof) towing the trailer. John Pengilly (JP2) let the train take the strain and took the BedPan line up to Bedford.
It took less than two pleasingly uneventful hours to get to Star Rowing Club, on the Great Ouse at Bedford. Bedford is famous for John Bunyan, the inventor of the soft comfy shoes sold in the Mail on Sunday, and Pilgrims Progress. The drivers took the cars over to the end of the meander in Cambridge, and the rest of us dispersed to local caffs for breakfast. Fran, Dave and I found our favourite Scottish restaurant and we dined on Sausage and Egg MacMuffins, whilst the others found more up-market places and had lartays and cwassonts.
Kevin had been to school in Bedford, and David rowed there as a youth. That’s all the facts I know about Bedford.
JP2 scribbled the boating list on a scrap of paper, i.e. who was going in which boat. It’s a fine art, and John writes it in his own hieroglyphics that only he can understand. He wrote the boating list every day before breakfast, with care and sensitivity. It was like the Queen working out who would sit next to Trump at the State Banquet.
We loaded up the boats with a ludicrous amount of luggage and set forth on our adventure along the Great Ouse.
The weather was warm and sunny, and the vibe was excellent and we were soon at our first lock in Bedford and passed through without a problem. When we arrived at Cardington Lock, it was out of action and there were engineers trying to fix it. Not to be defeated by this trifling issue, we portaged our skiffs, Viking style, across about fifty metres of meadow to the other side of the lock.
The Great Ouse and surrounding countryside are very very pretty. It’s a windy river, lined with reeds and lily pads, and overhung by weeping willows and poplars. If I was I poet I’d write a poem. But I ain’t so I won’t. The Great Ouse starts at Syresham in Northamptonshire and ends at Kings Lynn on the Wash, and is 143 miles long. Ouse is an ancient Celtic or possibly pre-Celtic word meaning river or slow-flowing water. So stick that in your Pub Quiz pipe and smoke it.
We stopped for lunch at Danish Camp. I was disappointed that there were no flamboyant Vikings singing show tunes, but there was an excellent bar and restaurant, so we could stock up with calories for the afternoons’ exertions. There was also an Eagle Owl in a cage called Ozzie. I whistled Paranoid to him, but either he didn’t recognize it, or was annoyed because he has heard it so many times. Owls are quite inscrutable.
After another five locks, we reached Eaton Socon, which is a lovely village just off the A1. The Great North Road used to go through until 1971 when a by-pass was built. So every army going from South to North would have passed through the village. The Skiff Club successfully invaded by river and bypassed all their defences.
Roger kept a recording of the meander with a Go-Pro stuck on the front of his kayak. All the photos have the nose of a kayak in them to show they are his.
We stopped at the River Mill and left the skiffs by the owners garden. The owners wisely segregated us in a large upstairs dining room, where we could eat without frightening the other guests. We tucked into assorted pizzas and burgers and lots of very fine beer
Our accommodation that night was in the Premier Inn, about a mile up the road. That night we got to find out the nocturnal habits of people we had been allocated rooms with. I had brought earplugs with me for the snoring but wished I had nose plugs as well.
After a day spent hauling around four people and all their luggage I was knackered and slept like a big sweaty, beery, chip-stuffed baby.
Saturday 25th May
Ah, the joys of a buffet breakfast! We stuffed our faces with fried food and coffee, leaving no corner of our insides vacant. Having cake at breakfast is a strange – and yet welcome – continental habit that I could get used to.
Back on the river again we rowed north through St Neots, Little Paxton, and Great Paxton. This is where Gordon was brought up and learned to drive at Paxton Pits before it was a nature reserve. He was brought up in a pub, but the Chicken in a Basket had such a profound effect on him he is now a vegetarian.
Roger and Amanda eschewed the pleasures of the double skiff, and paddled in his ‘n hers matching kayaks. They missed out on the boat banter, such as my amazingly witty double-entendres which I whipped out and waved around at every possible opportunity.
The locks on the Ouse are almost all regular gates at one end and Guillotine gates at the other, God knows why. Craig leaped off his boat at every opportunity to crank the gates, in fact, we started shouting at him “Craig – you cranker!”.
The Ouse flows closely to the London to Peterborough rail line, and trains whizzed past at enormous speed carrying Remainers north to an uncertain fate in Farage country.
We stopped for lunch at Brampton Mill, a very picturesque spot with yet more burgers and chips on offer. I dined modestly on beer (thanks Gordon) and an Aldi Chicken Wrap. It wasn’t delicious, but at least I could row without farting afterwards.
Kim talking, Paul still looks rough
The post-prandial leg of our voyage took us under the bridge between Godmanchester and Huntingdon, and through Houghton and Hemingford locks to St Ives. This town is named after a Persian Bishop called Ivo who preached in the area in Saxon times. His bones were later conveniently discovered and a priory was founded to make some money from eager pilgrims. Slepe became St Ives and still confuses thick tourists looking for the beach and over-priced pasty shops.
Our accommodation for the night was the Dolphin. It a charmless modern hotel, but very conveniently positioned with good moorings next to the river. After finding our rooms we dashed into town to find picnic food for the next day. Some people went to Waitrose and others went to Mace. The Skiff Club is a diverse organization and welcomes people from anywhere on the social scale.
Copious beer was enjoyed on the hotel terrace, followed by a slap-up meal in our own dining room. The carvery was excellent, and the mega-puddings were dangerously delicious.
There were several birthdays around the time of the meander, so birthday cakes were produced to add a few more calories to the mountain already consumed.
The party animals went off to explore the local pubs, but I had no room left for beer. I made the mistake of going to bed but was forced to listen to the hotel disco until after midnight. Once they started playing Dancing Queen, I sang along in bed with Agnetha and Anni-Frid. Not literally obviously, because they live in Sweden and I’m not that lucky.
Sunday 26th May
Dan’s itinerary for Sunday says “visit the fitness suite before starting”. Naturally, I was there at 6.30, but no one else joined me and I had to do the circuits on my own. Honestly.
JP2 is extremely good at waking up. As soon as the alarm goes he is in full conversational mode, whereas I can only grunt from both ends.
After another hearty breakfast, we re-loaded the skiffs and set off on the longest day of the meander, sixteen miles to Ely. At this stage of the journey, we have reached the Fens, the landscape is flat and the river is less windy but more windy. By the way that is a Homograph, two words with the same spelling that have different meanings – you can learn a lot from this blog.
To be honest, this part of the meander was a bit dull, the river was straight and the banks high, so not much to see. But there was always fun with the waterfowl, which are not as used to skiffs as London birds. I had to shout “lift your blades” several times while coxing to avoid whacking a dozy swan. Some of the swans were very protective of their nests and made it clear they wanted us to hiss off.
By a quirk of fate, my skiff with Craig, Russell, and Anna managed to be leading the fleet. We found a mooring place in the middle of nowhere, where there was some verdant grass suitable to sit on for our picnic lunch. I had bought a sandwich at Waitrose, whilst others had got a large array of savoury comestibles. Anna kindly gave me half a pork pie, a kindly act that I shall always remember.
Some skiffers took the opportunity to lay down and catch forty winks after their excess of Fun the night before.
Then it started to rain, so we quickly cleared up and got back into the boats for the long haul to the Lazy Otter pub. This was a big bungalow/pub with a marina, a bit of a peculiar place. But it did have a bar, a big garden, and a toilet.
Toilet stops are a key component of meanders. Meanderers are not in the first flush of youth, or possibly even the third flush of youth. I have just turned twenty-one again for the third time, and some of our senior members are over four times twenty one!
Roger, Dave and John Previte (JP1) are top class skiffers at an age when many of their contemporaries are in nursing homes or (to quote Monty Python) have run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. I saw JP1 stepping from the river bank onto two boats to reach a third like it was an Olympic sport.
The last leg of the day was to Ely, a former island in the Fens that covers twenty-three square miles and rises to the height of eighty-five feet. Not much, but it’s a mountain in the Fens. The cathedral came into view as we skiffed around a corner, and that’s all we could see of Ely until we arrived in the town.
We dumped our gear on the town side of the river and rowed the boats over to the Kings School boathouse to park them for the night.
Ely is a very pretty small town with an ancient cathedral in the centre that was started by a Norman called Simeon in 1083. The Lamb Hotel is an old coaching inn close to the cathedral that looks like it was last redecorated in 1083.
The room that JP2 and I shared had one window pane repaired with plywood, and a shower that didn’t shower. Hotel showers are often strangely difficult to work out, like they would rather you didn’t use them.
Before dinner we took a walk around the cathedral close and the park. It really is a beautiful building and worth a visit. Incidentally, Ely isn’t the smallest city in England, Wells in Somerset is. So there.
Dinner was a proper belt-buster three-courser at the Lamb, I ate lamb in it’s honour. They didn’t have any Dolphin on the menu at the Dolphin
Monday 27th May
The final day of the meander down to Cambridge. Dave Wright went to Cambridge as a student some time in the twentieth century. He rowed in those thin wobbly boats with a small shouty man at the back. Now he rows with Fran, who has the same horse-power as the entire Cambridge crew.
We went back down the Ouse to the junction with the Cam, and headed towards Cambridge. Lunch was supposed to be at a cafe called Five Miles From Anywhere, but we were early so we just had coffee. Each table had a bizarre metal bird to identify it, clearly someone had a welding kit and too much time on their hands
At Baits Bite lock we waited for ages for the water level to go down. The lock is modern and operated by buttons, so I guess it had a bug. I expect Captain Black switched it off and back on again (or something) and the issues resolved itself.
Since we were ahead of our schedule, we stopped for lunch at the Beach Pub at Waterbeach. They valiantly accommodated twenty-six unexpected guests for lunch, and we boosted their revenue considerably!
After a leisurely lunch we rowed onto the CRA Boathouse in Cambridge. It is huge and very modern, with top-class toilets which we all enjoyed. The boats were rapidly pulled out of the Cam, stripped down and sponged out. Roger reversed in the trailer and it was hands-on to stack the boats back in the correct order. Lots of fiddling and tightening of straps went on and it rained really hard. I took shelter while Roger and Dan threaded and tightened straps, I didn’t want to get in their way.
The minibus took off back to Teddington. After a final tug of the straps Roger set off with the trailer and the two cars followed to collect any bits if they fell off the trailer.
There were only two minor slippages of the straps on the way back. None of the boats fell off, even a tiny bit.
The Ouse and Cam Meander was a wonderful adventure. There was enough rowing to justify the beer drinking later, and plenty of time to see the countryside and enjoy ourselves. It has set a high bar for meander/holiday events in the future.
The heroes of the meander were Dan and Roger who were responsible for the organisation and logistics and enabled all of the motley crew to have a wonderful holiday together.
Some people have said that the Skiff Club is a drinking club with Skiffing. I agree with them.
Written by Tim Harness
Photos by Tim, Roger and Gordon
5th June 2019
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