6 locks, 16 kms

A straightforward run until we hit the second of the staircase ‘pairs’ and this time I put a front rope on in case the top lock started to back-fill again. It didn’t. The gates opened and we moved into the second chamber, lifted the bar and …… the lights went out. G climbed out to use the lock intercom and spoke to someone – no-one turned up so we had, yet another, lunch in a lock; again too high a wall to get the dogs off. He tried the intercom twice more later on and reached an answering machine both times. Eventually an unhappy someone turned up to liberate us.

We carried on through the (disappointing) Thoraise tunnel and the mooring we’d used on the way up, then dropped down through the deep lock back onto the main river and watched the weather coming in.

There was a mad scramble for coats and scarves as it suddenly turned bitterly cold (we’ve clearly gone soft), but we were almost at our destination – Maroc, where the river runs away down the weir on the left bank and the canal sticks to the right. Such a pretty spot and I have received loads of pics from boating friends that they took when they’ve moored here in the summer, using the weir stream to play in and keep cool. We, for the first time, were seriously cool already!

In the second photo above you can just make out Daisy silhouetted on top of the bank above the steps. This was one of those moorings where we were very grateful for Daisy’s tracker collar as she loved it here and spent long periods mousing in out of sight and inaccessible areas. I could use the tracker to locate her periodically instead of calling and stressing (thank you again for the recommendation Kevin Too).

Muttley and I went off to play – he loves these harvested fields where he can glean corn on the cob and legit with supposedly ‘forbidden fruit’. Leaf digging is quite good fun too.

We went to bed on Friday night totally unaware of the terrorist attacks in Paris.