29th May

Leaving Carcasonne was fun?? This is a notoriously shallow section of the canal - made worse by the water level dropping after we had moored! We helped friends in their boat get off the mud earlier that morning, thinking that their boat was so much deeper than ours and that we would have no problem…well we did! The lock keeper was very cross about the low levels and blamed it on young lock operators who lack his professional understanding of lock keeping - his family had been lock keepers for three generation and this did not happen in their day…get the picture? Well he ran off lots of water - we tugged and pushed, other people stopped and tugged and pushed [a bit like the story of the enormous turnip]; we revved the engine ahead and astern. The lock keeper ran off more water……after about an hour and a half we slowly slid through the mud and were off!! What a performance!!

Then we were just about 10 km further on when the canal crossed a little river [a tributary to the River Aude] on an aquaduct. Looking down into the river we could see about 5 carp cruising in the shallow side waters….
…so that’s as far as we got! We are tied to some trees in delightful country side, and Paul is in fishing heaven!!! So still kind of stuck, but for different reasons.