Boaters, looking after boaters' water.
GOBA is around 1,500 members on the Great Ouse, Cam, Lark, Little Ouse and Wissey. We keep members' moorings open from Bedford to Denver, publish GOBA News, and speak up for boaters whenever decisions are made about these rivers. No offices, no staff — a committee of members, elected at the AGM every April.
Since 1958, in short
GOBA has been going since 1958. The first newsletter, The Windmill, followed a year later — and the back issues are still worth a read. Six decades on, we hold roughly half of all the moorings on the Great Ouse: quiet wild moorings rented from the farmers and landowners along the bank, free for members to tie up at for up to 48 hours.
Keeping them cut, signed and open is most of what we do — funded by your subscription and by the Arthur Fleming legacy, left to the association for exactly that. The rest is standing up for boaters, with the Environment Agency and anyone else who makes decisions about these rivers, and putting out GOBA News four times a year. We're ordinary folk of all shapes and sizes who love the river.
How we think about it
At a lock one summer, the control box was overgrown after a week of sun and rain. One boater spent ten minutes on the phone complaining that someone should fix it. Another picked up the cutters and cut it back while the lock filled. Same river, same problem — two very different afternoons.
The Environment Agency has 280 miles of river to look after. We live on it — so where we can, we'd rather be the second boater. That's what Adopt-a-Mooring is, that's what the one-tap issue reports are, and it's why the friendliest moorings on the Great Ouse are the ones with a member nearby.
Your committee
Elected at the AGM each April; co-opted members fill vacancies through the year.