Moving on – leaving Deinze
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Tuesday morning – We had a nice relaxing start to our day with a 9:30 departure from Deinze, and thirty minutes down-river we turned left onto a commercial section of the river. Not too bad, although there was a large commercial behind us after a while. Not wanting to impede its progress, I pulled over into what appeared to be a winding hole where large boats can turn, and held station for a while, slightly worried that the wash of the commercial would push me to the bank when it passed as we already had less than two feet below us. I was so wrong though, because as it passed, rather than pushing us over, it sucked us towards it with our bow swinging right round until we were pointing at its side! On the plus side, my bow was still some thirty feet away from it and I could power on and tuck in behind. (I might need some advice on how to handle this better in the future, any suggestions welcome.)
Anyhow, we followed the commercial for the rest of the day passing through a couple of locks until we near got to Kortrijk. Just before the town we found a small pontoon and moored up. It did not seem too bad and so we went off exploring and shopping. However, when we returned, one of the ropes had snapped, apparently due to abrasion on some fixings on the bollards. I quickly made up some adaptors to avoid this and also added in more lines. On our way in, we had noticed that one of the signs stated that close to the lock, traffic would be slowing down, so we were hopeful that the snapped rope was a one-off, and anyway, by then it was nearly 5pm, and I thought we should be OK as there should not be too much more activity. That was WRONG on all counts – the commercials just kept on coming all evening until at least 9pm and the ones coming out of the lock picked up speed really quickly. We even had two side-by-side go past us, seemingly overtaking one another. Uncomfortable to say the lease, but we rode it out OK.
As we went to bed I wondered how early the commercials would start in the morning – I didn’t have long to wonder though as in fact the next one went through at 2:25am, followed by another at 3:25am (at which point Nicki woke up and suggested it was a bit early!) Annoyingly she had slept through the first earlier commercial – I however had been lying awake pondering recent events, eventually giving up on sleep for the time being and getting up to go over the next day’s plan in more detail. We planned to go down the Bossuit-Kortrijk canal and I had been in contact to check what times we could travel as the first three locks are manually operated. It was then that I realised some of the coming locks are seriously deep – 9.5 meters in fact, deeper than the height of a house – so another thing to think about.
Did I say this was relaxing? Aaaargh!!
Our mooring on the Leie – you can see the size of the commercial passing by!
Wednesday – This morning we set off for a scheduled 10:30am operation of the old locks on the canal. Unfortunately I had been phoning the wrong number to try and book a slot so on arrival we found that we could not get in, which meant that we had to wait until 2pm before we could enter the lock. This turned out to be quite lucky really, as it did give us a chance to explore Kortrijk and also make friends with another couple who had just bought an old barge and were even newer to this than ourselves. In fact they had only been going two months although they did have the advantage of a permanent mooring in Kortrijk.
Kortrijk is such a lovely town and Nicki and I agreed that we would return here at a later date and spend more time so that we could do it justice.
After a leisurely stroll and, of course, coffee and cake, we returned to the boat and at 2pm we started off down the canal through the first of the three old locks.
These were all very tight, being somewhat narrower even than the ones we had experienced on the Thames! But it all went very smoothly, and at the third lock the lock keeper told us that she had phoned through to the next lock to get them to hold it open for us.
This next lock was going to be the widest to date at 8.9M wide but what freaked us out was finding an 85M long barge in there already … facing towards us. This did not seem at all right but the lights were green and the gates open, so in we went, and to my surprise there was enough room for us, just. The gates closed, the rising bollards slowly rose and after what seemed an eternity, we were at the top and the gates opened. The commercial backed out, eventually turning 180 degrees before heading for the next lock. We were advised not to join it in the next lock so we decided to moor up for the night shortly afterwards.
These pictures should give you an idea of how incredibly small we are compared to the commercials, and this one of the smaller ones!!
We finally moored at a place called Leiestreek and whilst walking the dogs came across a diving club (www.duiktank.be) with a purpose-built dive tank of some 15 metres depth, 20 metres diameter and holding in excess of 4,700,000 litres of water!!! When I was diving this would have been such a brilliant training area.
The 15M diving tank housed in an old industrial tank ……
I see you are still having problems with locks!
Keep up the good work, we are still remembering you!!