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| Strepy-Thieu boat lift |
Drizzly start, then sunny with showers, clouding over later. A council lorry arrived and put a row of no parking signs down the middle of the wide concrete quay around 8.30 a.m. they said no parking from 6.00 a.m. today (they were late) until the 18th Aug. A tug and pan arrived to unload its cargo of soil and a road sweeper arrived minutes later. Mike and I went to ask which side of the quay was restricted and why. The road sweeper driver didn’t know for sure but through it was the whole of the quay and didn’t know why, maybe a market? We decided to move the car and then risk the forecast showers and move the boat. Mike moved the car on to the road leading to the old now disused Llangollen-style liftbridge, on the old canal right opposite the quay. A bin man arrived to collect the bag out of the litterbin at the far end of the quay, so I took the packaging from yesterday’s shopping expedition which he cheerily put on the back of his lorry. Two cruisers had just gone past, one Dutch and one Belgian, followed by the narrowboat Sika that our friend Helen (with peniche Floan) had mentioned in a text that she’d seen at Denain a few days earlier. We left at 11.10 a.m. winded and followed the three boats to the lift at Strépy-Thieu. They were waiting below the lift for the right hand caisson. We tied up behind them and Mike went for a chat. It was Mike, (a friend of Bill’s that we’d met before) on Sika, so they had a bit of chat, which they continued in the tank as we were on opposite sides at the rear end. He was on holiday with a French friend and had done the circuit we were doing, down the Sambre and up the Meuse and canal des Ardennes.
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| Inside the caisson at Strepy-Thieu |
It seemed to take the staff ages to get the lift ready to move, a mere ten minutes to get to within a metre of the top, then they had to dismantle some scaffolding before it could go all the way to the top. As the top end guillotine gate lifted the water level in the tank dropped about 40 cms. Mike had put the pins in to run the Markon generator so we left the top at 12.15 p.m. with the washing machine running. The other three boats were soon specs in the distance. Mike went in to vacuum the carpets (as we had 240V power) while I steered the boat. We arrived at the junction with the old canal and were soon at the quay above the top lift. Leeds and Liverpool shortboat K40 (last seen in Antoing after we came off the dry dock) was moored in the layby, but we didn’t stop there as it was opposite a cement factory entrance and lorries were going in and out creating big clouds of dust, plus there was nothing to tie to. Winded and tied a centre rope to a ring and put long lines to bollards fore and aft. Another cabin roof high quay, but this time with no ladders. After lunch Mike got the moped off the roof and went to collect the car from Ville-sur-Haine after debating whether to walk the 8kms or not. A small fast speedboat went down to the top boatlift and stayed about half an hour before setting off again back to where he’d come from. No traffic using the lifts, we thought, then the Dutch cruiser we’d come up Strépy with arrived at 5.10 p.m. and went to the top of the lifts and down. Mike returned and I helped put the bike back on board then he went to get some diesel for the boat from Cora.
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