Woke up ready and raring for today’s trip, with the option of a ‘fast’ route of about 4 hours on the Albertkanaal or a ‘tourist’ route of 5 hours along the Meuse – and we chose the slightly longer route in the hope that it would be a less stressful and prettier run.
Casper just chilling as we cruised along
Approaching the turn off for the Meuse we noticed a fuel barge and were able to make a quick stop to pick up some replacement gas bottles (both of ours had expired recently.) That was one job happily ticked off.
Turning off the Albertkanaal we approached Ecluse Monsin and radioed the eclusier for entry to the lock, only to be told that although we could go through right then, we would not be able to exit the other end at Ecluse de Vise until 4pm, which wasn’t a practical choice for us, so we quickly made the decision to reverse back out onto the Albertkanaal – back to plan B and the faster route. Unluckily for us, just at that moment a 100m barge was reversing towards the lock, so there was a flurry of wheel turning and engine revving (on our part) to get out of his way (he definitely wasn’t altering his course) and get back to the main canal. In actual fact, this proved to not be as busy as we had thought it would be, and from then on we made reasonable progress.
As we cruised along Nicki noticed that there were huge stretches of mooring along either side, so she had a few attempts at mooring up to gain confidence for the future (it’s only taken 4 years to give it a go!). Feeling reasonably confident she was considering trying to take the boat into the next lock at Lanaye, where we would cross over into the Netherlands. However, at the last minute she couldn’t bring herself to do it – partly due to a few other boats going in at the same time (one a huge commercial) and also the size of the lock overwhelmed her – 225m x 25m – so I took over. The other boats all took the left hand side of the lock, and we gleefully went to the left with loads of spare space around us – but then the lockkeeper asked us to move down as a 110m barge was in its way in behind us. Now we were tucked in at the front of the lock with this behemoth bringing up our rear.
Ecluse de Lanaye – Left to Belgium, right into Netherlands
There was still quite a wait before the lock was fully ready, but eventually we cruised out and into the Netherlands for the first time this year and later that day we arrived at Maastricht.
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