L'Avenir - cruising Europe's inland waterways

Damazan So, it seems I tempted fate once again. The slightly 'smarty pants' tone of my last post might have requested a more appropriate title - something like Pride Comes Before...(you know the rest). To be fair, I was just relieved that the resident engineer seemed to have found a way around a major repair. He clearly had that too good to be true feeling because first thing next morning he said, 'I'm not happy. There's more to it.' He then proceeded to dismantle the gearbox once again - and he was right. I'm a little vague on the technical details but the source of the problem was eventually found and was one of those things which apparently had been on the verge of going wrong for longer than we've had the boat. In short, a welder had had a brain fade - or perhaps a coffee break - exactly halfway through a job and had welded only two of four sides of a small rectangular piece of steel deep in the guts of the gearbox. After 8 plus yea...

  Val de Garonne  'If we wanted, we could be there in a day or so' (my words a week or so ago) Talk about tempting fate. I was referring to our impending arrival in Castets-en-Dorthe the final port of the canal system in the south west of France. From Castets it is possible to lock down onto the tidal river leading to Bordeaux and then the Bay of Biscay. There had been some talk of taking our boat to Bordeaux - a conversation to which my enthusiastic contribution was along the lines of, 'yeah, right.' I was keen to make it as far as Castets though - the end of a long journey from the north of the country to the south. Fontaine de la Font d'Uzas Our plans weren't to be thwarted by fate or mythical water gods but by Spring in full force. I've already posted some pictures of the riotous growth of trees and plants along the canal banks but a similar thing is happening in the underwater world. For some reason the water is particularly clean in t...