Ronquieres to Thuin via Seneffe, Landelies and Erquelinnes- Canal Brussels-Charleroi and river Sambre.

Friday 27 May to Saturday 4 June 2016.

For reasons which will become apparent this period has been condensed into one (longer than anticipated) posting and as I sit here not too much has changed!

27 May: After leaving the Ronquieres inclined plane we headed off post haste to Seneffe – beautiful weather until a kilometre before the turnoff toward the Seneffe Yacht Club when the heavens opened

Room with no view - through the saloon window.

and to thunder and lightning, we arrived with Lynn once again getting soaked. Checked in at the very nice clubhouse and after such a long day, went to bed early.

The clubhouse

Our mooring.

Over-wintering boats.

28 May: Still trying to find a solution to my computer screen issue we googled ‘computer shops Seneffe’ and found the website for Computer Genius http://www.computergenius.be/ – the website looked just the thing (have a look if you don’t believe me) so laptop in backpack we cycled the 5kms to the next village of Manage arriving at Rue Arthur Pollet 9, a house in the suburbs. Thinking the ‘shop’ must have moved, Lynn knocked on the door and was greeted by an old man in his slippers and BO who assured her that he was indeed the Computer Genius and who invited us into his office (the 1.5m x 1.5m entrance hall) and proceeded to give my computer a physical; pressing the 'on' button, shaking it to get the hard drive to run (it doesn’t when vibration is detected), pressing the screen, pressing his ear to the base and finally declaring he will need two days to take it apart and repair whatever is faulty. Forgive us if we singularly decided that a person who did not have an external monitor or an HDMI or VGA cable and whose working ‘bible’ was a four inch thick book on “Windows XP” might not be what we were looking for.

So instead we went for a great lunch at the Le Petit Baigneur which is a short way from our mooring.

Marrow-bone on toast for two to share.

Pork cheeks for Madame.

Steak Americaine pour M'sieur

29 May: Beginning in misty but not unpleasant weather we traveled east along the last of the Canal Brussels-Charleroi from Seneffe to Charleroi, and having passed through four big locks eerily on our own (it was Sunday and no commercials allowed),

This waiting pontoon is going to collapse shortly.

the scrap heaps and semi-derelict factories of Charleroi,

Crushed glass looking like a glacier.

Stunning graffiti!

"Bond, James Bond"

turned into the Sambre river in the rain and nine kilometres later after battling to get lock service at Landelies (he had been warned to expect us but had obviously had a good lunch and had fallen asleep), arrived in pouring rain at the Yacht Club Haut Sambre where we were directed to the visitors mooring with the barrage pouring water over the weir just 50 meters off our stern.

Landelies mooring.

Water pouring through the weir.

€1.2 per meter per night (€14.40 for us) for the goose-poo covered 25 meter long wall with no water, toilets, showers or laundry – nada. And €3 extra for electricity. We left early the next morning…

30 May: With the rain still falling (yes, this was the start of the extensive flooding which inundated much of western Europe) it was upstream against a steadily stronger current

Lovely day for a cruise old girl.

A walking tour!

Last lock of the day behind us!

looking downstream from our mooring.

until we arrived at Thuin and moored up on the wall just along from the visitors floating pontoon fully taken by 1) a big Fairline-type cruiser with no-one aboard, 2) Lord Josef, a small (6 meter?) tourist boat taking up a mooring into which we could easily have fitted, 3) a British registered barge whose fenders had adopted the shape of the pontoon, and 4) another large private barge which looked as if they had been there a while.

The visitors pontoon, fully occupied.

Apparently they have been here for two weeks
awaiting replacement batteries

Another log floats by.

The nice lady at the tourist office said that there was computer store at Gozee so off we went with hopes not high and left there €50 poorer but clutching an old Acer monitor which has a built in VGA connection and which displays the contents of my hard-drive just fine – cumbersome but a working solution at last.

The new office set-up.

And in Thuin we sat for three days waiting for the weather to improve; it is a very pretty town so the gaps in the rain allowed us to do some short exploratory rides.

The view from the Belfry

The suspended gardens.

One of the gates to the gardens

The view from our mooring.

What the hell - Cheers!

 The next morning our hull was covered in tiny snails.

2 June: With the current flowing strongly (4kph) we head upstream to Erquelinnes for a change of scenery,

Everthing is grey and wet.

moor up behind the barge Waterdog

with owners Lorna and Lawrence and doggy Tilley aboard, in the lovely, protected marina of the Yacht Club des Frontieres,

How did he manage to get his car aboard?

Supper

and during a break in the rain, take a three kilometre ride across the border to Jeumont where we stock up on wine at French prices at a big Intermarche, Erquelinnes having nothing like it that we could discover.

4 June: Erquelinnes being a bit of an odd place we decide to ride the current back through the four locks to Thuin. With throttles at just over idle so that we can keep headway, we surf downstream at between 9 and 11 kph.

Current.

Lock #1 doesn’t answer the VHF nor the phone number in our book so Lynn calls the lockkeeper at Lobbes and he says he will sort it out – “Wait five minutes”. Four minutes later an apologetic lockkeeper arrives, sprints to open the lock doors to let us in and, to many “desolets”, we stop next to the water point, tie up and Mr Lockie helps us with the hose.

Lock #1 - water and Walloon waterway permit for Sambre and Meuse.

After chatting awhile we focus on the water filling job and the lockie wanders off; Lynn suddenly notices that we are tilting and that the secured center line has jammed – yup, without warning us and knowing full well that we were tied up so that we could do the water thing, our genius (but hugely pleasant) lockkeeper decided to empty the lock. Much shouting and with still more “desolets” he winds back the sluices and dashes back to the doors behind us, lets in a rush of water, and we level out again. Close call!

At Lock #2 we get stuck in the mud…the lockkeeper told us subsequently that all the rain has caused a one metre build-up of mud in the canal cut and unless you keep in the channel directly facing the lock you will get stuck.

Lock #2.

Lock #3, no lockkeeper. Lynn knocks on his front door and the neighbours send their son around the back. Eventually he emerges and, with hardly a word of greeting, lets us pass through, down into the boiling current straight into a fishing line which the idiot fisherman had cast right across the river and left unattended (which is why I thought there was no line attached to the rod). Engines screaming astern and losing control in the current I shout to Lynn to break the line but braid, as we know, is tough. So in a cloud of diesel smoke from protesting engines and trying to avoid ramming the bridge, Lynn frees us and we head of to lock #4 – apart from a TV crew filming the lockkeepers at work (and us passing through), we locked through without incident! But turning around to face upstream into our mooring was ugly…we made it eventually and here we sit, on the same place on the wall with the same boats on the visitors pontoon behind us, waiting for the Meuse river at Namur to slow down so that we can finally be on our way into France.