It is Thursday 16 June 2011 and as I write this at 6pm, Paul is having great fun clambering all over the little boat with a scrubbing broom and a hose. We return the boat at 9.00 am tomorrow morning - clean! That's because their cleaning charge is $120.00 AUD. Unfortunately we are all alone in this section of the marina tonight, so if he slips it is overboard he goes, rather than having a big boat next door to grab on to.
We have been in home port for two days because there has been a second, one day lock-keepers strike and because the last two days have been extremely hot. After two tiring weeks we have been happy to just sit here in Homps and use our car (with air-con) to sight-see the local area. Paul was keen to swim and Homps has a man-made lake that proved too enticing to ignore in the heat.
Here are some photos of our trip upstream (read that as - UPHILL!) to the medieval city of Carcassonne.
Puddling along in the sunshine. After all of the rain of the last month, the canal is pretty muddy.
We are tied up by the side, awaiting our turn to go through the lock. Here comes a boat crewed by six women, all my age and very well skippered by a woman who obviously knew what she was doing and had all of the others working as a team.
At another lock, there are about 5 boats waiting with no room left at the bollards, so we have had to tie up to a tree on a bend. Put the kettle on!
Here is a lock keeper at his control box. This one had a sense of humour as well as a talent for turning junk into sculpture. His control box is mounted on a metal sculpture of a lock-keeper.
Traversing the locks after this one, we made friends with these people from Belgium. The two women and the guy at the wheel were coppers, and the big guy at the front (near the bikes) was a winemaker. They were a very jolly group and were traveling with their dog (as were many others). You can see Pooch under the table.
I can't tell you how hard it was going up stream / up hill. If you were at the back of the lock, like these people above, you didn't cop the full impact of the water rushing into the lock. (Did you notice my pun there? "Cop" the impact...... oh, well). But Paul and I went through about 9 locks at the very front, in our little boat, and we were determined that we wouldn't be pushed back into the boat behind us by the force of the water. You have to really hold tight to your ropes as the water pounds against the front of the boat, and as the boat rises in the lock, you need to take up the slack rope while still keeping sufficient tension to keep your boat against the side wall and not floating out into the middle where it wants to be. And you do all of this with Paul in the boat, motor idling, holding the rear rope and 2 metres lower than the crew member (read - ME!), on the top of the lock holding the front rope, strained around a bollard which is often not in a very useful or helpful position, and against the rush of incoming water. Some lock-keepers are thoughtful and patient and the rush is gentler. But if the canal is under pressure, with lots of traffic, or the lock-keeper is hungry for lunch or an aperatif, they just open the gates full, and I thought I'd never regain the skin off my hands pulling on that @+**%$! rope.
This was at the top of our first tripple lock - looking back the way we had come. Four boats went through here together - one missed out and had to wait at the bottom for about 50 minutes for its turn. It takes about 30 minutes to go up the triple lock and 20 minutes to come down. I took this photo while I was still hanging on to my rope .......
... and then the lock keeper said I could stand on the centre platform of the lock gates to get a photo right down the middle. The triple lock lifted us about 6 metres higher than our starting point.
And at yet another lock we were absolutely on our own. We arrived right on 12.30 (lock-keeper lunch time) and had to wait an hour in this ugly weed infested spot. There are sections of the canal where the beautiful plain trees, hundreds of years old, are missing. Removed in the far distant past (like here) or currently diseased and being very reluctantly removed by the authorities.
In this section of the Canal (one of the busiest) there was only one lock pretty enough to be a contender in our competition. Here are several photos. It is kept by two young women who have a number of other enterprises running on the side. The house itself needs paint, but the windows are sparkling clean, there are pots of flowering plants, a selection of local wines for sale, a table and chairs for morning or afternoon tea, fresh fruit and vegetables for sale from the thriving vegie garden on the other side of the lock, and canal necessities like gloves (for rope burns), sunscreen, umbrellas, sun hats, and more. All tastefully dispalyed and tendered by the pretty young things.
It may look a bit shabby, but this canal was built in about 1650 and most of the paving in and around the locks is the original stone. This last little hut/office/shed is probably 35 years old, but the actual lock residences are more likely to be 300 years old or more, with an update at about the time of the French Revolution. That's old!
Part 2 following.
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