Level the locks
OUR BRIEFING on how to operate the locks had felt, well, brief. Now it was game time. We’d travelled only a short distance upstream from the boat base in Douelle and soon encountered the first lock on our seven-day Le Boat cruise up (and back down) the Lot River in south-western France. As luck would have it, there were no other boaters around to watch and mimic, so the only option was to tackle it ourselves.
If you’re a South African, for argument’s sake, who’s had few to zero run-ins with locks in your life, these large stone- and steel structures can at first appear quite intimidating. We were on a wide natural river after all, and not a constructed canal, and adjacent to this lock (and almost every other one we navigated through) was a fastflowing weir that added to the tension and high levels of anxiety.
We’d been told about the correct order in which the sluice gates and then the main gates need to be opened or closed, how to temporarily moor the boat and control it while the water gushes all around, and how
