Exploring the upper Cam by Dingy

Stage One - practicing on Bourn Brook

Jon Whose_Name_Shall_Not_Be_Mentioned_On_The_Web and I walked through Comberton with our amazing Explorer 100 inflatable (but deflated) dingies and paddles, and headed south to the brook by Fox's Farm, which is a tributary of Bourn Brook. I had my small l'espion digital camera with me, in a plastic bag, to record the expedition for this site. As a result the first pictures look a bit foggy.  
Here Jon is inflating his dingy. We are crouched in the long grass by the side of a bridge. We soon hit a problem - how do you climb into a small rubber boat without falling into the water. The answer was: very slowly and carefully.

 
And here we have the first action shots - Jon, and my feet, all floating scant centimeters above the water.

 
We were disappointed to find that what was a suitably deep channel by the road soon turned into a shallow trickle of water over some reeds and rocks, blocking any further progress. As a result we walked back through Comberton with our amazing Explorer 100 inflatable (and inflated) dingies and paddles, to the car, and drove to Byron's pool just outside Granchester.

Stage Two - the real thing on the River Rhee

By now I had discovered that keeping the camera in my pocket and not falling in the water allowed me to take clearer pictures. Here you can see Jon launching his dingy. We found a muddy patch on which to put the boat, and then shuffled it into the water.

And so we progressed slowly and happily up the river.

Note the bizarre paddling technique. We found that it was actually easiest to row the boat forward rather than backwards, with the flat stern of the boat going first. The only problem was that if you hit weeds with one of your paddles the boat would spin rapidly around.

The only other person we saw on the upper river was this canoeist, travelling about five times as fast as we were.

The thing ahead of Jon is the M11 motorway bridge over the Cam, with a red car travelling over it. I've driven that part of the motorway scores of times, and I've never noticed the river; usually only an Audi A4 in the outside lane doing 100 mph. Incidentally, have you noticed how all the lousy BMW drivers of the nineties seem to have traded in their cars for Audis this year?

This is my fantastic picture of the Granta/Rhee junction where they join to become the Cam. Not exactly clear, is it? Those white shapes on the water are angry swans. The Granta goes off to the left, and the Rhee to the right.

Here we are on a straight stretch flowing through some fields between Barton and Haslingfield. Note the weeds in the river - we identified three types:

• Long straight single-stranded green water weed that gets tangled around your paddles
• Blobby oxygenated green water weed that gets tangled around your paddles
• Long straight multi-stranded green water weed that gets tangled around your paddles

Here I've just handed the camera off to Jon. Note the long straight multi-stranded green water weed that gets tangled around your paddles on the right, and the blobby oxygenated green water weed that gets tangled around your paddles on the left.

At this point I'm happy because I saw a kingfisher. Jon didn't see it, but later we spent five minutes watching a big white barn owl a) sitting in a tree, b) flying off looking so magnificent that both Jon and I exclaimed how magnificent it looked, and c) defecating copiously a few seconds after our previous comment.

Although the big grey thing behind me looks like a cow at first sight, it is actually a large concrete outlet pumping treated waste water into the river. The area here smelled of dishwashing powder.

For some reason we didn't take pictures of the two footballs we found, or the weir we had to climb around, or the people fishing from the bridge, or the chicken-of-the-woods fungi we saw on some of the willows, or the really fast and narrow reed-infested section of the river we struggled through. Instead, here is a picture of my feet, and some telegraph poles.

Finally, here I am in the back grounds of a church in Harston, nearly five miles from our starting point. And we covered that distance in five hours! (Five minutes later I was to discover that the last bus back to town had passed thirty minutes earlier, so we had to walk back to Cambridge.)