Retirement with No Problem

Moored Nr Waterbeach, River Cam

We started on the roof today… I was delighted!

It has to be done this summer, we really should have done it last year.  A daunting task to think about doing ourselves, but I knew once we started it, all would be OK   So that is a quarter of it done, spending about 4 hours with the grinder and sandpaper.  Ended up covered in blue ‘dust’ by the end, good job I put on my worn out jeans and shirt. We now have a multi-coloured NP with a nice grey ‘undercoat’ colour on part of the roof.

The weather was good here most of the day, unlike other areas in the country, but by the time I went walking with Lucy it was already beginning to look as if some rain was on the way.  I got half way across an open field when I saw black clouds with thunder and lightening heading straight for me, so curtailed the evening walk, managing to get back to NP before the heavens opened and a full blown storm rocked us.

The headache of yesterday never really went away, and came back again as the storm crashed in over the boat with high winds,, hey it’s suppose to be June!

We have had to put on springers tonight, a trip boat out of Cambridge has been up and down a couple of times, firstly this afternoon with a live jazz band aboard and this evening again with a full blown disco, everyone was having a great time… it sure does draw a lot of water though, and earlier when it went through it had pulled the pins from two narrowboats moored further upstream, leaving their bows stuck in the middle of the river!   The trip boat is going a bit fast though, but time is money I suppose…

Ha, I went to look for a link to explain ‘springers’ to you, and typed into google narrowboat springers ropes and the only site that came up was my own!!

OK then, springers is a term used for securing a boat.  I don’t do it really properly, but basically …. no, no, I can’t explain.. I’ll sleep on it and maybe draw a diagram tomorrow…. unless, of course, somebody finds a link that explains and posts a comment!