No worries! -Mareuil-sur-Ay to Dormans

"No no no no no no no no" replied the lock keeper when I asked if there was a possibility that we'd have a problem on the river today.

Eight "noes" seemed reasonably emphatic, but just to be sure I asked him what speed he thought the river was running at; three, four kilometres per hour perhaps?    He shook his hand in that sort of wobbly rocking motion that that means "approximately" and said four, five, but there is not a problem.

Hmmm, five.   That's getting very close to being a problem, but not quite, so we swallowed hard and called out something in French that we hope meant "bewdy mate well get on with it then", and he pressed the button which dropped us the last two metres down to the river level. 

The water wasn't overly terrifying, although it was hardly pretty with it's flood-pus colour and the swirls and eddies made it look much worse than it really was.  I hate to draw these sorts of comparisons, but really it wasn't unlike the upper reaches of the Brisbane River on an outgoing tide.

Revelling in our new found ability to travel at a river speed limit in double figures, and that with the engine barely ticking over, we would have arrived well before lunch if we had left sometime before morning tea, but we hadn't.   We were early enough though to be mid pre-mid afternoon snooze when the only other boat on the river today arrived and moored behind us.  After Linda and Eric introduced themselves we knew that mid afternoon and late afternoon snoozes were not going eventuate either and if we didn't exercise a good deal of discretion perhaps our late evening one may be greatly impaired as well.  

They've just been where we are going and we've just been where they are going, and even if we hadn't had eleventy-three mutual friends there were many notes to swap and that all takes time.

We chatted for so long that the lights went out in the sky, and came on on the church spire and the flood level of the river dropped by almost fifty millimetres. 

The lock keeper, as usual was right.  Today, there was not a problem.