Saturday 29 June

We must now get a move on to get to the coast.  We have to wait for the office to open at 9:00 to pay, get water and fuel.  Having done that we are off just after 9:30, not bad!

By the way our scales show that our dinner last night was not a great help in the diet department.  We will make up for it later in the week.

We don’t go very far before our first stop.  Since coming on the canals we have been aware that we are woefully short of fenders.  This has caused me all sorts of trouble in running around changing fenders from one side to the other as the arrangement of locks changes.  We are also told to expect much more traffic on the Canal du Midi, which means we may well have to share locks and not be able to chose what side to tie up.  We have been told that the only chandlery for miles is just ahead.  So we stop there and buy 4 new fenders.  Two big round ones, which we will need for stern too mooring in the Med and two ordinary ones, which I don’t know what we will do with after we leave the canal system.  Anyway we are now fully fendered  on both sides of the boat and can manage to tie up wherever is necessary.  That will be important because the system of locks here in the Canal du Midi is different than before.  Many of the locks are automatic, but there is no cord to pull to start the sequence.  What you have to do is drop a crew member off at a little waiting pontoon in front of each lock.  That is of course me.  Then I walk up to the lock and tell it which way we want to go and it opens (and drains, if necessary) the lock.  I can’t get back on the boat, so I stay next to the lock and wait for Richard to bring the boat in.  Then I catch lines and tie us up.  There are some locks (so far we have only seen them if they have multiple chambers) that have lock keepers.  But the lock keepers do not take your lines and therefore I have to be put ashore anyway.  The upshot of this is that poor Richard has to do nearly everything single handed.  If he had to try to change fenders over at the same time, it really would be impossible. 

Today we did 8 locks, but two of them had two chambers.  That really just means that there are two locks together.  You go out the gate of one straight into another.  There are some 3 and 4 chamber locks later on in the canal.  So in effect we did 10 locks.  We had identified a mooring area to stay in, but it is completely full.  There don’t seem to be many boats moving on the canal, but it is full of barges, where people obviously live full time and they take up most of the mooring areas.  We go a little further on from the mooring pontoon and find a long bank with bollards on them.  However the bollards are not very close to the shore.  In the end I wind up jumping off the boat with a line and we tie up.  Another new experience.  So we are here on a wild bank.  We did have a walk along back to the lock, but there is nothing there really.  We have had dinner on board and hope to make it to the home of Cassoulet tomorrow.

Just a few words about the canal.  It has a different feel to the Canal de Garonne.  It is narrower and much greener and prettier.  It is very old, having been completed in 1681.  Most of the lock chambers are oval rather than straight sided and some are very deep with a difference of level of up to 6 metres.  We are disturbed to hear from a cyclist we spoke to at one of the locks that further along all the beautiful trees by the canal are diseased and are being cut down!  Apparently we will find the banks devoid of any trees.  What at pity.