Halfway across the River Yare at the end of the cut at Hardley Staithe, Norfolk, UK. Boaty McBoatface!
Updated: Dress up as a pirate and capture PaintedJaguar's boat!
The PaintedJaguars already have a holiday booked on the Norfolk Broads this weekend! Does this qualify for some kind of pre-emptive award? We're hiring from the Northern half of the Broads, and the tidally restricted crossing time for Great Yarmouth/Breydon Water is 12:45, with approximately two hours of travel time to the hashpoint from there. Factoring in a late-lunch-pub-stop on the way suggests we'll arrive at around 4pm (cool, but shame it's not a Saturday), although we could easily be an hour or so off that time either way.
We'll be in a bright yellow boat called Pearl Horizon 1 if Sourcerer (or anyone else) wants to look out for us anywhere between Great Yarmouth and the hashpoint sometime in the afternoon. Future internet access may be limited for us, so apologies if we don't contribute to any further planning discussion.
At 15:10 after a short drive and walk Sourcerer got to within 15 metres of the hashpoint which was in the river, as expected. The temperature was 11 or 12C and there was a threatening rain cloud and a stiff breeze spoiling the day. Not far north, it was sunny. There followed a chilly hour of waiting around. There were a few nice photo opportunities as boats passed. Then I got a video of a very furry caterpillar.
A small boat approached and I wondered if I could hitch a lift. It turned out the be the official Broads Authority police boat so I decided not to interrupt their day.
At 4pm on the dot, there was the yellow peril in the distance.
I signalled using semaphore (which I don't know) so my message was random garbage. Pearl Horizon sailed past at speed and I wondered what was going on. Perhaps I'd signalled the wrong boat. "Why is that lunatic gesticulating at us?" Then the boat made a 180 degree turn and came close to the reeds, sadly too fast for me to jump on. 360 degrees later, a second attempt was worse but the boat was now the right distance off-shore to pass the hashpoint close enough for "coordinates reached". We exchanged a few words and decided it was not really safe to attempt a jump. A zero speed nose-on approach might have worked. We exchanged a few more words and mentioned our hope to meet on Geohashing day only six more days away.
The journey from the Northern Broads across Breydon Water went according to plan without incident, the only disappointment being that The Berney Arms pub, where we'd planned to have lunch, was closed. We instead pressed on to Reedham for a very late lunch, which had the advantage of being pretty close to the hashpoint, allowing us to plan our departure well enough to be able to reach the hashpoint at pretty much exactly 4pm.
On the way, whilst cutting a corner on the wrong side of the river, we encountered a police boat (probably the same one that Sourcerer had seen earlier), who fortunately did nothing worse that just looked at us accusingly as we hurriedly veered back to the right side of the river. This resulted in us deciding to obey all the rules of the river as we approached the hashpoint, and not cut across to the wrong side of the river again, but instead go past the point, turn around, and come back on the correct side.
We'd had some discussion about how to get a proof photo of the GPS readout, since zeroing in on the hashpoint was not going to be as easy as it is for land based hashpoints, and eventually came up with the cunning plan of one person steering the boat and holding the GPS, whilst the other controlled the throttle and held the camera. In theory this meant that we both knew if we were on course or not and make appropriate adjustments, rather than the more conventional method of a single driver doing both the steering and throttle with somebody else giving directions. Unsurprisingly, this turned out to be a complete disaster, as on the first pass we simply careered into the reeds at the side of the river. Sourcerer seemed to interpret this as an invite to board the boat, and attempted to climb down to meet us, although our thoughts at the time were about nothing more than not actually crashing into the bank!
We pulled away and attempted another pass, although this time with just one person in full control of the boat. Some conversation with Sourcerer suggested that he did want to try and board the boat, although our attempts to achieve this were worse than the initial foray into the reeds, and we decided that it wasn't going to work. We then waved goodbye to Sourcerer, and afterwards made a third pass over the hashpoint to get a proof photo.
by booking watery transport before the hashpoint location was known at the (52, 1) geohash on 2016-05-15.
2016-05-14 52 1 - 2016-05-15 52 1 - 2016-05-16 52 1 - KML file download of Sourcerer's expeditions for use with Google Earth.
This page was last modified on 17 June 2016, at 09:02.