Hello Folks
Yesterday I went to paddle on the River Soar with my WCHA friends and one very large canoe!
Our put in was at the Boathouse at Barrow on Soar where we were the host of Colin Broadway who owns the pub and we took the opportunity to have a Sunday lunch on our return.
A wide variety of craft began to appear. Some of which you may have seen before like these two unidentified floating objects.
Pic1
Part of the reason for today's paddle was to see this boat which belongs to Colin back on the water.
She is a Chestnut Ogilvy named because the design was made by the Chestnut Canoe Company for the Ogilvy family who wanted a large stable canoe for hunting and fishing etc and she is a whopping 26 feet long!
After the usual faffing and milling around we got our boats on the water including this interesting EM White centenial that Andrew is paddling.
and hear is Andy paddling his fairly wide UFO.
Then there is Al in his even wider UFO.
and as we headed off down river you can see Nick's Chestnut and Peter in his home built wood stripper which is probably the lightest, slimmest boat on the water today.
Part way down we got out and carried through a tunnel to a portage point where we had a bit more flow behind us.
Andrew and Sam had swapped boats.
and as we paddled on sedately the Chestnut Ogilvy came flying past again.
The most impressive bridge we passed under was probably this one.I think it must have been complicated to work out the curvature of the bricks in the arches with them being at an angle to the train lines above.
We reached a junction with a chevron sign that I would normally associate with roads looking out of place as I have not seen them used on a river before.There must be some fast craft around here!
Rather than portage the locks team oglivy had a lock key so we were able to go in the locks which is the easier option with such a large canoe and the rest of us got to go too.
Some of the locks here have rather picturesque lock keepers houses.
The last stretch was quite a haul as the wind got up against us and was also very gusty. We paddled on through the outskirts of Loughborough passing under many bridges.
A few miles further and we were back at Barrow, in time for a late lunch at the Boathouse
Thanks to Colin, Nick and all who attended for making it such an exciting and interesting day.
Thank you for reading.
Cheers
Alick