The art of locking
Sans Peur
Grete & Fred Vithen
Wed 12 Nov 2014 19:18
Starting point lock 71 upstream
What a team work!
Grete and Max are climbing the slippery ladders like monkeys. The “shute” is about 3 m:s every time now. At this moment this is a never ending story.
Together we found a perfect way to make this journey really unstressful. The locks are narrow and on top of that flooded now. Just a few km:s apart.Full with autumn leaves, means jamming water filters.
So, again, we learned something new. Slow approach, we now that trick by now. Max found the formula to reduce the turbulent, sometimes violent movement when 22 tons is raising in the lock.
Grete was sometimes fighting the line hard in the lock front, to keep control. Means when we are tied up and the lock is closing, the next thing happening is that it starts filling up. And theres a lot of current filling up this closed area.
The reason the captain wanted the boat as close as possible to the front was the short distance to leave the lock.
Max: “Why not try this. Move to the end. And then while we are waiting for the lock to open we just manhandle the boat to the front (it takes ages before the lock opens).”
Worked perfect. We saved time. Good to have this mate onboard.
14 locks today, without a single stressful moment.
Just a bit for a moment when Grete thinks water filter is jammed again. But nothing there. Moving the boat out of the dock (they are filled with leaves) by hand, means no more jamming (we hope).
Canals are most of the time 1,8 m deep but sometimes less. Our draught is 1,4 m. Noice changes dramatically when the canal suddenly get shallower. Not to scary anymore. Must be a lot of soft mud down threre.
Safely moored again. Time for a drink, some wine …
Do we sleep well? You bet.