Let’s start with the high point of the day.

Bill and Ben the Flowerpot Men (and Weed, did you notice Weed?) were fixtures on BBC children’s television when I was a little kid. There were only ever 26 episodes made in 1952 and 1953, but they were repeated for the next twenty years. Of course, this was before the days of plastic flowerpots, so it’s pretty unlikely that they were those colors. Still, they might have been. There’s no way of telling as it was black and white TV.

We started out from March this morning with good conditions, but after an hour or so hit a bad patch of weed. Waterweed grows quickly in warm conditions, and if you take a boat through it, it gets wrapped around the propellor and rudder, and your boat pretty soon stops moving. Most canal boats have a handy thing called a ‘weed hatch’. This is a section of the hull you can remove above the rudder (with sides around it so the water doesn’t come in). You can then reach down and pull the weed off the prop. Here’s and extract from the manual for Wharram Percy on the weed hatch.

The weed hatch is at the stern, located behind the engine and gearbox under the back deck, and can be seen when the deck boards are removed. It is hard to get at. You will probably need to sit on the engine with your feet in the bilges, so make sure the engine has cooled off and put your wellies on. A course of yoga classes may also be useful before attempting this.

If the style looks familiar it’s because I wrote that bit of the manual. We did not have time to wait for the engine to cool off, so I had to sit on a pad on the engine. For the next half mile we had to stop the engine and open up the weed hatch about half a dozen times. I think perhaps Bill and Ben could have done without this sort of weed.

We did pass the Middle Level Commissioners’ fleet of sophisticated weed removal boats.

At least, that’s what I think they were. They were moored up doing nothing, so it doesn’t really matter what they were.

Even when we cleared the weediest bit, going was still slow because the water level was down, and in a shallow canal the boat has to work harder to push the water out of the way.

Then the wind picked up. It was a headwind of course. Did we see John Betjeman on a bicycle? We did not. (Probably because he’s dead.) When we finally made it to Peterborough and tried to moor, the strong wind was now pushing us away from the moorings, and we had to use the engine pulling against a mooring line, and the help of a passing gongoozler to get the boat over to the bank. However, we are back on the Nene now. There are reports of weed problems upstream, but we can deal with that when we get there.

Let’s finish off with some pictures of water lilies, which have the good manners to stay to the sides of the canal and not clog up my propellor.