Short and sweet

The Great Trent Thrash Day 5:
Newark to Gunthorpe

Those noisy revellers revelled until two in the morning - and that was on a Thursday night. It didn't bother me, but Jim really couldn't face another night of listening to young people enjoying themselves, so we have had a change of plan. Another contributing factor is that we have been invited to a party in Shardlow tomorrow night! So we have brought the leaving of Newark forward a day, and shall spend that day in Shardlow, on Sunday, instead.

Thus our sojourn in Newark has been short, but very sweet. Wandering around the town again this morning we couldn't help but exclaim at its wonderfulness, the architectural features, the old shop frontages - and, indeed, old businesses - the untouched-by-the-late-20th-century-ness, the market, the fact that the place was milling with people, the nice pubs and bevy of lovely looking eateries. Or as I put it somewhat crudely, if you brought people here from Lewes, they'd wet themselves. The thing is, Lewes is lovely, in an achingly trendy and rather affluent way, but it knows it, and is in danger of becoming, like Brighton, a parody theme park of itself and everything that made it great. Newark, at the moment, is still just lovely.

The trip today also was short and sweet. The wind was bracing, but the rain thankfully held off. Newark to Hazleford took about two hours; the four-ish miles from Hazleford to Gunthorpe were covered in forty five minutes. It was hard to do a timed mile as there are so few landmarks. There are however kilometre markers, and we timed one km at six minutes, meaning we were hitting the speed limit of 10 km/h, which I calculated (in my head, so feel free to correct me) as 6 1/4 mph. Not Warrior warp drive standard, but that was against the wind and the current, so we were probably faster on the way down. And it was achieved with remarkably little vibration or apparent effort on the part of boat or engine (apart from the engine pipe shaking itself down so hard that it was almost impossible to get off).

Better still, there was NO oil on the cabintop at the end of the journey. There was, for the first time this trip, an inch of water in the sterngalnd drip basin, but as I'd forgotten to screw down the greaser before we set off at maximum revs, that doesn't seem bad going. Up until then, since putting the new packing it, it hadn't leaked at all. So still a case of so far, so good....