Roeselare, Izigem – Leie
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After a couple of days of rain we woke up to clear blue skies, no rain and plenty of sunshine. Another ideal for travelling, and today we began journeying back to Bruges for our winter mooring. However, as we had made quite good progress to date we decided to turn off the Leie river and head up the canal to Roeselare where the canal itself ends.
We had been told that mooring was possible right at the very end, so I was a bit surprised to find there were a lot of medium sized commercials using this short stretch of canal; despite appearing to be quite pleasant there were numerous bits of industry that the barges serviced. We had followed a smallish barge called Pamy into the single lock that served to connect the canal to the river. I felt a bit bad when I realised that we had followed it down the river and let it get a long way ahead of us, not realising it was also going to turn into the canal. When we contacted the lock, they said they would wait for us, and although we were first out of the lock I let Pamy overtake us thinking she would stop en-route to Roselare. Instead she too went to the end and turned round; when we got to the end of the canal, Pamy was there with a lot of much larger barges moored up, either loading or unloading.
The quay walls were all too high for us but still, we managed to moor up right at the end hoping to make do, only shortly to be approached by an irate commercial skipper – it was clear that he did not like us mooring up in front of him. I’m not sure why really as there was plenty of room for him to manoeuvre, but still, we moved to the opposite side which was just as uncomfortable, and awkward as we had to lift the dogs on and off the stern deck …. but we did have a nice view of the brewery opposite!
Roeselare was pleasant enough but because of the awkward mooring we only stayed the one night before moving back down the canal to Izegem, about an hours journey away. The mooring here was much better although there was some construction work in progress next to us, but not too noisy or intrusive, and Izegem turned out to be quite a lovely little town with the added bonus of some nice dog walks along the canal. Further along, the canal was lined with chestnut trees and several people were out and about collecting them. We had previously found some and tried them out but they did not taste that good; however, talking to the people collecting them, it appears we should have sun dried them for a few days and then further dried them for a few months, so maybe that was why.
Below is a short clip of us leaving the canal. We are attached to floating bollards so that the 7.5M drop in the lock is quite relaxed.
