A Cruise On The Ouse

[Smoggy]

There is no towpath on the great ouse, they are a canal thing.

[dom]

52 minutes ago, Andrewcook said:

As to Travelling along the Ouse, is it very  Weedy in places,and Lilepads to avoid, The Towpath is it  overgrown?

The weed (and the river in general) really varies a lot. I was up on St.Ives bridge earlier and from there you can see lots of streamer type weed common in faster flowing waterways. Elsewhere, on the Old West in particular, you tend to get denser weed. The EA have also put a lot of effort into getting rid of Pennywort, which formed huge rafts in places.

Whilst it's quite canal like, having locks and weirs, there's no real towpath as such. There are some quite nice long stretches of bankside path though. I quite often cycle along the bank from Holywell or the Pike and Eel to Needingworth.

[Bikertov]

The Ouse around St.Ives was very clear this weekend when I was there, and you could see a lot of the streamer weed Dom is referring to about 2 foot below the surface. I'm guessing the bottom is typically only around 4 foot deep, although my depth log often shows a bit more but I'm not sure how accurate the reading is because of the vegetation.

[webntweb]

17 hours ago, Smoggy said:

There is no towpath on the great ouse, they are a canal thing.

All canalised rivers originally had a towpath, often called a haling way, as they were originally canalised for horse drawn working boats. Most river towpaths are long gone, although some rivers still have considerable lengths remaining - nowadays used as footpaths or cycleways.

I've not cruised the Ouse/Cam system for about 25 years but in those days surface weed was a bigger problem than bottom weed. Perhaps the bottom weed has become more of a problem since the deeper draughted cruisers have been outnumbered by the more shallow draughted narrowboats.

Dom says the EA have done a lot of work to remove Pennywort which was definitely a problem when we last cruised. The boat we last hired had the biggest weed filter I've ever seen on an inland boat which, on the upper reaches of the Ouse and a couple of the smaller rivers, we were having to empty every 20 to 30 minutes.

I've attached a couple of pictures showing the extent of the surface weed problem in those days.