or The Art of Locking
Some people just don't enjoy the experience of going through a lock. It can sometimes be quite demanding of your skills in handling the boat, and particularly of your patience when the waiting time before the lock (sometimes without even a place to tie on) is longer than seems warranted. With only a couple of exceptions, locking for us has been a pleasure: the motor out, the roar and swirl of the water rushing into the lock, a chance to converse with other sport boat people, the jolly restless rocking of the boat, the challenge of one person holding the 7 1/2 tons of steel boat on a single rope.
The Rhein had only a few locks and they were extremely generously sized, big enough for several commercial barges, each up to 100 metres long, plus any number of sport boats. The Main, on the other hand, has 34 locks until you reach the Main-Donau Kanal. They mostly have two chambers, one small chamber for litttle sport boats, and a big one for the commercial ships and larger sport boats.
The art of locking requires you to get into a sport boat lock if you are narrow enough because there you do not have to wait for the big boys and the sport boat locks are, well, after all, built for the sport boats. You drive in, push a abutton and the locking begins. BUT the water only dribbles in, like it took us one hour for a small lock to fill. The corresponding big lock next to it needed 15 minutes!
Theoretically then, it would be much quicker in the lock for the big ships. Theoretically, yes. In fact, it can still take a very long time, maybe an hour, which feels like 3 hours if there's no place to tie on and you have to keep the motor running as youtry to stay in one place. Or, as in the Eichel lock on the Main, a perfect place to tie on, but then we had to wait for 2 1/2 hours before a big ship came along for us to follow into the opened chamber.
Waiting...
At Eddersheim, the lock master asked us our width. '3 meters' we said, being honest. ''Then go in the small boat lock.' Well, we are 3 meters wide PLUS the width of our fenders, not to mention that our bimini (the sun roof over the back of the boat) is a touch too wide, and the small boat lock was only 3 1/2 meters wide. So we asked to be locked through on the other side but the lock master refused us. We had no choice but to attempt it. It was very windy and there was a fish ladder to the left of the lock which caused a lot of turbulence. Poor Sulina got very rocked about during our 4 (!) attempts to enter the lock, her fresh paintwork scratched and the new bimini torn about 1 meter. Johannes struggled bravely to keep us level and between the 2 walls and Liz tried to push the boat off the walls, getting her arm squashed and badly bruised in the attempt. Finally we were there. But afterward, Sulina had grown by half a meter. She would now always be announced as 3 1/2 meters wide and would never again be forced to go into a too narrow boat lock.
Occasionally, the experience is just a perfect example of the art of locking, as at the Steinbach lock, where a big ship overtook us a few kilometres before the lock and we just calmly motored in, tied on and drove out after 35 minutes with no waiting time at all!
Or the amazing run we had from Kitzingen to Schweinfurt where we went through 5 locks, averaging 15 minutes per lock, in good communication with the lock master throughout the day.
More of those, please!
