We woke to a foggy, but enchanting, morning by the barrage. As we were thinking of getting ready to leave around 9am, a Swiss cruiser passed us and entered the lock. So we sat back down and had another cuppa.

We met up again with the VNF lady from yesterday, and she continued to give us personalised service (even though the Swiss cruiser was ascending the locks just 30 minutes before we arrived, she made sure the locks were emptied and ready for us). We passed through Clerval and L'Isle-sur-le-Doubs, where we noticed a double mooring pontoon immediately in front of a supermarket (very handy for topping up on supplies). As we went through Colombier-Fontaine, we encountered the first of the lifting bridges.

We then passed through Dampierre-sur-le-Doubs, with a cute (unserviced) mooring immediately below the town church. A few kilometres further on, we arrived at the confluence of the Doubs and the River Allan. At this point, the canal flows across the Doubs (tricky when the Doubs is flowing fast), and then follows l'Allan into Montbéliard (the Doubs then doing a 180 degree turn under the white bridge at left (below) to flow back up to its source along the Swiss-French border).

After a few more kilometres, we reached the next lifting bridge on the entrance to Montbéliard, and made friends with more motorists forced to wait while we went through! This lifting bridge looked more like the one made famous by Van Gogh in Arles.

Finally, we reached Ecluse 15 (the last lock before Montbéliard). We had been watching the weather as it approached us from behind, and while we were going up in the lock, it started to rain lightly. We thought we might have timed our run to perfection as we did the last 500 metres to the port, with only light rain, but as we entered the port, the skies opened and dumped torrential rain on us (actually, on Rita, who was outside doing the ropes for the mooring, which I was inside doing the steering, and the photography).

As the rain eased a little, even the cat from the next boat decided to jump aboard and seek shelter under our dogbox flytent!

After a while the rain cleared, as it often does after these summer storms, and we even managed a golden sunset for our first evening in Montbéliard.