Moving on to Ghent
Saying our goodbyes to Bruges, we set off for Ghent – although we had made our travel plans, we wondered if we would be able to stop overnight on the way or if we would need to press on. So just in case, we made a 9am start only to stall stall at the first opening bridge – a railway bridge where we had to wait about an hour for a break in the train times before we could continue. 
After that however we made good progress, and we began to find a few larger barges coming the other way, but there was plenty of room for passing, but even so, Bob and I took it in turns to increase our stress levels.
<—- This one was 110 meters long. I’m sure I will get less fixated with how big they are but at the moment they are quite intimidating.
As we closed on Ghent we came to our biggest lock to date, so big in fact that we could almost go in sideways. I contacted the control and they politely suggested I might like to wait for the two larger professional barges to go in first. I had no problem with that other than I could only see one large barge and what appeared to be a small tug in the recess of the quay. Then the gates opened and after a large number of vessels exited, the large barge went in, the tug started up and it seemed as though the whole quayside started moving! In fact the ‘quayside’ was an enormous barge being pushed along by the tug. We had kept well back from the other two barges and what you can’t see from this photo is that we are more than halfway down the lock.
Evergem lock
From here we started to transit round Ghent with more and more commercial traffic moving around us. Whilst we had wanted to stop over, it did not seem like a good idea to moor up and expose ourselves to wash from these commercials, so we pressed on. Heading towards another railway bridge and with our previous experience of railway bridges, I radio-ed through to enquire about opening – I thought they said it would open at 35 minutes past the hour, not that long away, so we hovered …. and hovered .. and hovered. After 15 minutes of this hovering, we concluded that maybe they meant it would open in 35 minutes and indeed it turned out to be not much longer than that and off we went again.
The next bridge had enough clearance only if we dropped the bimini, so despite having added the lights to the underside of the bimini just a few nights before, we lowered it (very gingerly) rather than wait. At this point we had been advised to phone ahead to get the Batavia bridge opened; we did this and they said that it was OK. This was a footbridge and it looked like it had enough space to go through, but rules are rules and so we hovered, wondering how it opened and why we needed to wait. Whilst all this head scratching went on, at some point the lights went from red to green – suddenly there was a moment of clarity as we realised that the whole bridge rose on hydraulics and that pedestrians could still use it but had a steeper climb!
At last we entered Portus Ganda where we found our mooring point for the rally already marked up on the quay. ESME and Elysium were already there and after hellos and introductions to others that we did not know we got ourselves settled in, followed by a few drinks and food in the evening. (Nicki ended up more tired than drunk and I just ended up with a bit of a hangover, but we were still up nice and early to explore the town a bit though.)
So here we are in Ghent, and the last few days spent with Bob and Jane before they leave for home. We are going to miss them, they’ve been such good company and great fun. Roll on their next visit.