We left Boulougne at 06.00Hrs French time on August 29th and arrived at Soverign Harbour lock at 13.00Hrs Bst. As for the crossing itself least said soonest mended, rough short westerly waves mid way made it very uncomfortable, it also caused us to slam quite badly which has caused the Port Garboard plank to moove slightly up near the bow so we have a slight leak.
We are lifting out on the 6th of Oct Just before we go to Australia to see the family.
This will ne the last entry for this year. We hope to start again in April 2012 for our trip to the Baltic. Best wishes to oue blog readers. The pic is of Dinant from the Castle.

Windmill in Bruges

Pic of Gent.

We have had bad wifi connection since Gent hence a long time since the update. Also there has not been much to tell. Gent to Bruges was un eventfull. Bruges is a beautiful city andvwe spent 4 days siteseeing. Then on to Nieupoort passing 14 swing or lifting bridges in convoy with 10 other boats. In Nieupoort we where greeted by the Belgium Classic Boar Association. Great fun. We also visited Tyne Cot Cemetary,the largest military cemetary in the world, one and a half million + names including my Grandfather.
We then decided that we had had enough of canals and so prepaired the boat to return to sea. Thence to Dunkerque, noisy, dirty,ugly and generally not good. on to Calais to pick up a friend. Then to Boulogne in preparation to cross to Eastbourne at the end of August. Pics Later.

We have arrived in Gent from Klein Willebroek a small town right opposit Boom on the River Rupel, the weather there was heavy rain and drizel but we managed a great walk arround a nature reserve. We decided to go from there to Gent in one go, 41 miles. It dosent sound a lot but on inland waters it required som very detailed planning to be at the right place at the right time, reason, The Rupel leads into the Schelde, one of the largest rivers in Belgium, both rivers being tidal with up to 5 Knots current. It was esential that we got to the junction at 4hrs after low water in Antwerp. So we fought the current on theRupel for the first hour, then turned to run up the Schelde to gent for 4 hours. It all went well fo the first 2 then things got difficult with an enormous amount of rubbish on the surfice and some very large barges coming in the other direction. Heavy drizzel and rain, with difficult visability.
All went well and wev arrived in gent at arround 15.00hrs in bright sunshine.
Pictures will follow in next blog.

As you can see we have mooved on a long way from the River Meuse now. Most of the journey on the final part of the Meuse was quite industrial but still interesting. The main change came at the junction between The Meuse and The Albert Canal, one of the principale canals in Belgium, it is massive, we where going to Maastricht but the last lock before was 13Mtr deep and had 8-10 of some of the biggest barges we have seen. 150-170 Mtr long and up to 2000 tons, waiting to enter so we decided to keep going on the Albert.
We came off the Albert on to some much smaller canals with quite unpronounsable names but prity country side and very flat.
Our next destination of any note is Gent in the next few days.