Leopoldsburg to Turnhout, and others in between
We left Liege heading the long way round towards Leuven where we are scheduled to meet up with Lucy on 21st August.  Whilst our journey took us towards Maastricht in Holland, we chose to stay on the Belgium side of the border and follow the canals there, partly to avoid any issues with license fees for Holland at this time.
Anyway, we followed the Albert Kanaal and as it was a Sunday there was not much commercial traffic around – I hoped that we could get off the main canal and take a less commercial route, Zuid-Willem Svaart; all appeared to be going well and we only encountered a couple of commercials. One appeared to be hovering mid stream for a turn across my bow, so I decided to Blue Board him and go round. He didn’t seem that bothered and just ignored me but I’m sure it was the right thing to do.  The bit that did not go quite according to plan though was when we turned into the small canal …
… on reflection, all the warning signs were there. A small canal with four, yes four locks, side by side. We went into the one that was indicating as open. It was pretty big – there were signs asking for papers and we were getting radio comms in a language that we did not understand. Then, on checking the route and map I realised that we had gone into the main locking system …. for Holland! Luck was definitely not with me at this point either, as the lock keeper in this largely English speaking part of Belgium, did not speak English. As best I could, I asked if it would be possible to back out since there were no other boats with us but he indicated that the best course would be to carry on, turn round, and retrace our steps, which we duly did. Not a very comfortable lock to navigate once, let alone twice in quick succession. There were lots of cleats in the walls and the ropes came away really mucky both times.
Having got out and resumed our intended course, we arrived at a quiet canal. It was quite a change as it started with two small locks, only 7M wide and two friendly lock keepers to actually talk to rather than communicating over the radio to various control towers. This seemed to bode well but after the two locks I realised we were being re-joined by the main canals from Holland. That sort of explained why the navigation software had pointed me at the larger canals.
We carried on until we found a rough mooring for the night just past Rakem, moving on the next day to Sint-Hulbrechts-Lille for another couple of nights just a short distance from the town.
From there our plan was to detour to a small town called Leopoldsburg which is at the end of the Kanaal naar Beverlo – quite a narrow canal so I was surprised to encounter a commercial barge coming towards us – a bit tight to say the least but we made it. Further on we came to an industrial site which was where they must have come from, and just past that was a lifting bridge we had not identified but a quick phone call and it was raised almost immediately.
From there on, the canal got narrower but it was very pretty with trees lining the banks and providing welcome shade from temperatures in the high 30’s. We followed the center line of the canal with carpets of lilies on either side, collapsing and sinking as we passed by.
Leopoldsburg was of special interest to us as the yacht haven has a pump-out station and we really needed to empty our waste tank. That done, plus water topped up, we found a nice spot to moor up, although the Havenmeester managed to con us out of more money – despite being a member of the VVW, apparently we needed to be flying its flag or we couldn’t get our discount of one free night! And the cost of the flag meant that overall we saved 1 whole Euro. Despite that, it was a nice mooring, close to the centre – we were there for their weekly market which we enjoyed but there did not seem that much of interest in the town otherwise, although it was extremely hot which did limit our enthusiasm.
We decided to give the dogs a good wash while we were there, using the pump we’d bought, and we were pleased to find that it worked like a dream, especially as they were smelling pretty high at that time. Oh, and we also rescued a pigeon from the water – it looked as though it was just happily floating but I soon realised it was actually exhausted and couldn’t get out; I managed to net it out and get it onto the bank, and overnight it seemed to recover.
After our second night we left and headed back down the canal, through the lifting bridge into the main canal, through three smallish lock in quick succession and then turned onto the Dessel-Turnout canal system.
The last lock keeper did not speak English or French and was trying to warn us about some sort of problem with the lifting bridges further ahead. We stopped off at the junction with the next canal in order to check with another lock keeper, from whom we gathered that the bridges along our planned route only operate twice a day on Sundays, with the next opening scheduled in three hours. We mulled this over and decided that, as it was going to be a bit of a slog to get to Turnout in one day, we would continue until we found a nice mooring near Rekie, actually a very nice mooring.
It was all very peaceful and shady, with good satellite reception, surrounded by acres of woodlands and walks – a narrow canal, but still the commercials kept on coming, luckily only whilst we were moored. It would have been a challenge whilst on the move – still very hot but when it was cool enough, it was great for the dogs, so we hung around for a couple of nights.
From there we moved on to Turnhout, and once again, the canal was quite narrow. Very early on we were joined by a largish cruiser on our tail for the whole journey – although 5mph is a comfortable speed for us, it probably wasn’t for him but he didn’t seem to want to push for an overtake so that was fine. One scary moment did occur when we spotted a commercial bearing down on us (it had not been showing any AIS signal so when we spotted him in the distance, we had to try and figure out just how this was going to go down). Eventually we started to receive his AIS signal which now showed that we would arrive at a bridge at about the same time – I was pretty comfortable that I had priority, since I was sure that the locks ahead had us going downstream, and downstream has priority over other traffic ….. but did I feel lucky? Not really. In the end I gunned it to at least get to the bridge before the commercial, leaving the following cruiser to make up his own mind as to what he would do. We got through the bridge with a couple of hundred yards to spare on the commercial and immediately put ourselves as close to the bank as possible. Did I say that it was very narrow here? As he went past Nicki was shouting to me that our stern was dangerously close to the bank. What could I do though, our bow was being sucked into the hole the commercial was leaving by the displacement, and I needed the rudder hard over to kick the stern away from the bank. We got past with highly elevated heart rate and almost soiled underwear. All part of life’s rich tapestry apparently.
Finally, we arrived in Turnhout, to be greeted by the harbour master with a casual “I’ll pop back this evening for payment”. We found a nice mooring in the shade of some buildings and went off to explore. It really was just too hot though, and on return to the boat we set up the A/C and hunkered down for the evening.
There appeared to be a couple of places worth seeing in Turnhout, and we decided to plan our visits for the next day, hoping that it would be a bit cooler ….. as a footnote, one of the odd things about Belgium seems to be the really strange opening hours they keep. Many places close for lunch but this can be quite variable – even some cafes, bistros etc. seem to close over lunch. What’s that all about? Most high street shops seem to close on a Saturday and other places seem to pick random days to close.
We arrived in Turnhout on Monday – the main attraction, a Playing Card museum, is closed on a Monday so we went on Tuesday.
Afterwards Nicki went off to Carrefour to get a bit of shopping, but apparently they close on a Tuesday!
As a footnote, it’s now 9pm on our second evening, and still no sign of the harbour master for mooring fees, and I have been over twice to the office to pay, but no-one is around. Maybe this will turn out to be a freebie. Who knows?