The lake at Gondrexange where we spent the night, was built in the middle ages by a bunch of Monks who were apparently keen to establish a fishing industry in the area.
That was all well and good, and after one summer “on the shovel” sorting out a few hundred square metres of garden, I sympathise with anyone digging out seven hundred hectares of lake and lining the edges with stone, particularly in the intemperate climate here, but they did it without a lot of planning for the future really.
If they’d thought about it, surely they would have twigged that in another thousand years, give or take, someone might want to build a canal through their lake and that in that event the levels would be just a bit out. If they’d have dropped the level just a bit there would have been no need to build levee banks and berms right through the middle to stop the lake from flowing into the canal!
I only mention that because one of their engineer descendants must have been having a bad day when he (or she) decided to design the part of a Perkins fuel injection system that was probably intended to leak from time to time, in a place that can only be viewed while inverted and holding a mirror between the heat exchanger and injection pump, and it certainly can’t be tightened without removing pretty much everything but the galley sink first.
No doubt as the owners of the canal did when they were being dug with great banks needing to be formed through the middle of the lakes, we shall have to call a chap in to do the dirty work. Perhaps it will take more than one.
We did reach Lagarde without incident, and without being able to see the source of what is a substantial leak in the system but we did manage to catch most of the fuel at least. Now we will resume the little projects we had put aside till next year, stay put for a bit, and wait for things to fix themselves.
At the same time, we had a call from another charming young lady from the phone company. They having become exasperated with our exasperation we think, volunteered to set up our account for us if we didn’t mind.
They would, they said, phone us back in a few minutes by which time it would be done.
Come to think of it, we could probably dig a lake of our own before all this sorts itself out.
No comments
Post a Comment