Matt meets Les

Our Open Day held from 12 noon to 4:00 pm on Sunday 5th May attracted a  number of interesting visitors old and new, all in all a good day’s activities.Our photo shows visitor Matt Richards with project leader Les Reid sharing experiences and reviewing some of our artefacts.

Committee members Margi and Duncan got the new badgemaker working with badges and key rings, and we look forward to our next project, in all probability the Newark Festival in June – we will confirm this with a posting later.

Finally thank you to our visitors – we enjoyed your visit, and hope you did too!

Our next Open Day will be Sunday 7th June 2013 – please come and see us, we’d love to see you.

This superb giclee print is now available as a print or framed, and all proceeds from sales go to the restoration of ‘Leicester Trader’ –  for more details please see our sales page, or click on the image.

Long standing friend Bill Middleton and one of the last remaining regular barge skippers to run to Newark is 91 today. As he is staying with a relative in Knottingley I had a run up there to have a yarn and a pint with him. I collected member and also a former tanker skipper Frank Major and we called at the Waterways Museum at Goole, then went to the former Harkers shipyard and then on to see Bill.  Left to right, Frank Major, Les and Bill–birthday treat sausage and mash and a lager.

It is with sadness I have to tell you that my friend for many years Geoff Wheat passed away yesterday. He had been suffering from long and painful cancer treatment and it was hoped he would make a good recovery but unfortunately not to be.                       He was better known in recent years for skippering the Trent gravel barge Fusedale for Humber Barges Ltd. mainly on the Collingham to Whitwood run. He spent most of his working life either campaigning for commercial carrying or hands on reviving operations and has worked just about every navigation and every sort of carying craft,–too many to go into here. Unwittingley at the time, he was partly responsible for starting our project by asking me if I knew the name of a laid up barge at Knottingley when I went mate with him for a few trips back in 2005. When we had purchased what we finally found out was Leicester Trader he towed us from Knottingley to Cromwell on our journey home.

Geoff Wheat loading sand at Collingham, Feb 2005

Farndon Riverside pub true to the name.

Trip boat Newark Crusader seen accross the pub car park. Hope it stops rising before it gets to year 2000 level –there was a concern the pontoon would come off the top of its mooring piles. At one time this water seemed more predictable–we got it a week after the snow melt in Derbyshire.

Riding high

Sunday 23rd december 2012 , today Les and Duncan went to various places to get pics of the flooded river.  Christmas might be spent checking ropes and levels.  Last night at 10.30 the automatic message came from the Environment Agency alerting flood risk but at least I can just look out from the bedroom window to see that the level was not as bad as they were making out. After receiving the message one old lady was so afraid she never slept–In fact the level only came up another two inches overnight.

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