Sunday 28th July.
As you can see from the picture above the weather has improved, sunshine from now on we hope. The canal is also much quieter than we expected, there are hundreds of boats still in the boatyards even at this peak time, so we have the moorings to ourselves and have not had to queue to go though a lock so far. The boat owners are blaming Brexit/the poor exchange rate, it seems in a normal year most people on the canal are British, no brits are hiring boats this year, good for us, not so good if you own a boatyard.
We have now started to get to grips with the boat and the canal. As the canal, which was built in 1666, was designed for “shipping” it is much bigger than British canals. There are some large barges passing through together with lots of “floating caravans”, our boat is very much the smallest craft however as it is steel and weights 14 tons, most of the fibreglass pleasure boats would not stand a chance in a collision with us so we tend to get right of way.
There are 63 locks in total, we have passed about 15 so far and have got into a routine.
The locks all have lock keepers who operate all the sluices and gates with a hand held remote control (see picture opposite with the keeper, the remote control and a penguin!) There is no chance of them doing anything as common as catching ropes so we have to manage that ourselves.
I drop Gill off ahead of the lock and she walks up to wish the keeper a cheery bonjour so he has to stop whatever he is doing and begrudgingly open the gates for us. I then bounce our 14 ton boat along the sides of his nice lock and throw the ropes up to Gill.
This is not easy as it sounds as it is often 20ft up! Once the keeper has decided we have passed the first test he or she lets the water in.
Sometimes they are kind and do it slowly but one lady lock keeper opened the gates so fast I had to slam the boat into full throttle just to stop us crashing into the gates.
Eventually the boat reaches the top of the lock and I scrape the sides as we bounce our way out. In most cases this is repeated immediately as many of the locks are in pairs or even three together. None of the keepers have been cheerful.
The picture shows a boat belonging to a couple from Oswestry leaving a lock. They sailed from the UK across the channel to Bordeaux and then through the canal bound for the Mediterranean .