Taking the long way round

Hello and welcome to the latest blog from The Olivia Rose Diaries on April 9^th 2025.

Last week was my 200^th blog. I didn’t realise it was such a milestone until after the event – where did all that time go?

This past week has seen us heading south towards Maastricht on the Zuid-Willemsvaart Canal. We’d followed this route on our way up two years ago so knew what to expect.

‘It’s very quiet, isn’t is?’ said Michael. ‘Not as many commercial barges as I would have expected.’

‘It is a bit odd.’ I agreed. ‘But it’s the weekend. And it’s much nicer without them.’

Forty eight kilometres and seven hours later, with six locks and two lifting bridges behind us we arrived at Arles-Rixtel, our evening stopping point, a pleasant place with a long stretch of bankside mooring in a tree-lined avenue.

‘I just hope there will be space,’ I said as we drew closer. ‘It was almost full last time we were here and we grabbed one of the last spots.’

The mooring was empty bar one boat.

‘Strange, I said. ‘Nobody here.’

We had supper, enjoyed a pleasant evening stroll around the town, and set off in good time the next morning. Arriving at the first lock we found out why we were the only boat on the water.

‘Where are you going?’ the lock keeper sounded rather surprised to see us.

‘To Maastricht.’

‘I’m afraid not. A lock further down is shut for repairs.’

‘Well, we can wait a day or two…’

‘It won’t open until June. At the earliest.’

We weren’t expecting this. We use a combination of paper charts and digital apps to decide where we are going and keep an eye on potential closures or problems ahead. It is the digital information which is usually the most up-to-date but our route planner app had not picked up on this closure at all. There was nothing for it but to turn around and spend the whole day retracing our steps. After that we would take an alternative route along the River Maas, a longer trip adding on roughly 150 km and four extra days travelling, but it would still get us to the same place.

No longer quite so confident of our route planner we spent the evening researching this revised route on the River Maas, checking the locks individually ourselves. We soon found out that the lock at Grave was also closed and wouldn’t open until late May. So that route was no longer an option.

We had been expecting problems with navigating through France due to drought and weed, but we had never expected to run into problems in this country, and certainly not on such a major river. All systems need maintenance, the bigger the locks often the bigger the repairs, but considering that it is common to have three locks side by side, because of the volume of traffic, the normal procedure is to close one for maintenance and leave the others working. We didn’t expect to find all of them out of action.

Out came more maps and we assessed our options, which were rapidly decreasing. We could head back west, passing through the distinctly unappealing commercial megaports of Antwerp or Ghent in Belgium and into northern France that way, adding yet again to our distance and our fuel bill. Or we could take a detour along the River Waal, which is the Dutch name for the Rhine, looping around the closure on the Maas, and hopefully then continuing our trip as planned.

‘We’ll be going upstream on the Waal.’ I screwed up my face. ‘How strong is the current?’

‘About four or five kilometres,’ said Michael. ‘It will be a hard slog against it.’

The Waal is the busiest waterway in the Netherlands, and is the main route for inland shipping in/out of Germany. It would be even busier now that commercials who normally used the Maas would be forced to take this same detour.

‘Do you want to go all the way west?’ asked Michael.

‘Definitely not.’

‘The Waal it is then. And it will probably take us between 5 and 6 hours to do 46km, and Olivia Rose will be working hard against that flow. It will be a long day.’

And it was indeed a long day but nowhere near as tedious as we both feared.

A few hours into the journey I squinted at what I thought were some strange-shaped rocks on the sandy riverbank. Then the rock moved, lurching awkwardly to its feet. It was a camel and it wasn’t alone. There were four of them. How they got there or why someone had decided to bring them here we would never know.

A few minutes later I noticed a man on the opposite bank, standing in the shallows.

‘There’s something about him that doesn’t look quite right.’ I peered more closely. ‘Oh! Is he……?’

Michael had been looking upriver through the binoculars and now he swung them round to look more closely.

‘Yup, naked as the day he was born. And I am definitely seeing things that I’d rather not.’ He hastily put down his binoculars.

The man wasn’t alone. It must have been a naturist beach. I could see people sunbathing, walking down through the trees with bags slung over their bare shoulders, and chatting to each other, obviously quite unconcerned by their nudity. I was too far away to make out any detail, thankfully, but it’s a strange thing when you take our clothes away from us. We become a vulnerable and weak-looking species. Millionaire or pauper, we all look the same when we’ve got nothing on.

Around us the commercial barges charged up the river, all power and pent-up energy. At one point there were five of them, spread out across the entire waterway, all going in the same direction, like a pack of hunting dogs straining to get their noses out in front, and us so tiny and insignificant amongst them.White frothing bow waves rose up high and then folded into sinuous waves that ran along the length of the barges, often washing over the gunnels. Their engines thrummed deeply as they passed by.

There were double barges carrying coal, heaped up like pyramids of black sugar in their hold, others three abreast and two long making a group of six all roped together, a huge wall of steel. Others carried gravel, sand, recycled metal or gas. Some were empty and charged along at speed, others were full and laboured stoically against the strong flow. But they were all going much faster than us, and the wash they created meant that Olivia Rose swung to and fro as if she couldn’t make up her mind which way to go. Michael was constantly correcting these swings, and it meant we had to be alert at all times, very different to our normal cruising where she almost steers herself and it’s easy to relax and look around you.

All things come to an end and at last we left the Waal and cut down onto the quieter canal that would connect us once again with the Maas. Coming out of the lock at around 5pm we saw that there was another motor cruiser tied up behind a wall just outside the lock and decided to join them for the night. The port we had hoped to reach was still over an hour away and the day had been long enough.

After seven years cruising we know from experience that there are times when you can’t go the way you want and so you go the way you can. Occasionally Plan B actually turns out to be better than Plan A, at other times it is an adventure or an experience as today had been. But it is all part of living a travelling life and it is this uncertainty, the never knowing quite what the day will hold, that is part of the attraction of spending our summers this way. Of course, you can always have too much of a good thing……

See you again next week.

MJ