Ely in Autumn

Certainly less crowded than Ely in the summer.....

Most of The Plastics are craned out and littering the banks in spots such as Cathedral Marina (home of expensive diesel and people with no regard for local planning regulations...) like so much cholesterol clogging the sides of vital arteries, or like the bottles, yoghurt pots and other detritus that gets washed up on a lee shore after a good gale.......

But one wasn't.......

How's this for a perfect example of why the pillocks who own these wholly unnecessary menaces to navigation should be discouraged:

The Pippins had headed to Ely for the pump-out to avoid clashing with The Rob Roy Boat Club's rowing regatta which was taking place upstream towards Cambridge.

A jolly time was had: we stayed overnight, there being, at last, plenty of room to moor, and we finally got to enjoy a tea at the sublime "Peacock's Tearoom". (Tearoom connoisseurs please note, if you are within a 50 mile radius of this place- 65 Waterside, Ely, CB7 4AU, then it is a MUST VISIT!!!!)

We set off for home on Sunday at about noon, chugging from our mooring at the 48s just upstream from the pump-out, with our revs at tickover: cool, serene, autumn Sunday boating.

Then it happened: A Plastic rounded the sharp bend just before the mooring at "The Cutter Inn", saw us, then executed what can only be described as a hand brake turn, some 20 feet from our stem, to come to rest in the centre of an 80 foot mooring.

WHY?!!!!!!!!!

The only answer is that the selfish, miserable, low-down, no-good, son of a failed pig-fondlers apprentice was seeking to deny us access to a public mooring.

Okay, so we weren't planning on stopping at the pub (which does do a jolly good lunch, by the way), but we might have been!!!!!!!!!!

Also, the fact that he manouvered across our bows, inside of 30 feet of the stem of a moving 26 ton steel boat, suggests, to me at least, that the perpetrator had probably sounded the noon-day gun at 11.00 or earlier, and was probably half pickled with gin.

God help me, I could have shot him.

The range was close enough!