We finally realised that we couldn't stay forever at le Maroc, so we departed around 0800h, allowing John and Frances to move Antonia to the back of the quai and get some cooling morning shade.

Our first lock for the day was at Thoraise. It was a relatively deep lock with a rise of 3.68m, so I was glad to have the slider, rather than having to get a rope around a bollard up on the quai. Everything was going smoothly until the boat had risen almost to the top, when I realised that the cross-bar was lower than I had expected. However, by the time I had realised this, the rope had locked on itself and was starting to tip the boat. Having experienced this once before at Agen, I knew what had to be done, so I reached for the knife hanging just inside the wheelhouse door, and cut the rope. The boat righted itself quickly, and I now had a short length of rope in my hand with an eye at the end!

Having learned this lesson, we then proceeded to enter the tunnel at Thoraise, one of the little highlights of this section of canal, where the exit to the tunnel is blocked by a waterfall! Luckily, there is a sensor halfway through the tunnel which detects your approach and turns off the water!

So we proceeded through, did a hard right turn, and headed for the River Doubs again. But as we were going through the narrow flood lock between the canal and the river, the lack of a bowthruster caught me out again and I drifted too far to the right, catching the zigzag fender on the exit of the flood lock. This then broke one of the ropes attaching the fender to the boat. But luckily the fender was still attached by another rope, so we pulled it on board, while I headed for the middle of the river and killed the engine, where I hovered mid-stream and made running repairs with another rope on the fender. It hasn't been a great start to the day!

So we restarted and continue on to the next lock at Rancenay. This is a double lock (two locks end-to-end) with a total rise of 5.10m, so it was going to be an interesting challenge. But that assumed that we could get into the lock in the first place, which we couldn't because it was out of order. So we tied up at the waiting pontoon, and Rita walked up to the phone at the top of the lock and called the VNF, who said they would dispatch a van. While we were waiting, a hire boat approached carrying a large number of Germans who were obviously close friends. Rita had a talk to them in German, and then they tied up on Kanumbra while we all waited. After about 10 minutes, the VNF van arrived, and within a few minutes the gates opened on the lock. We asked the Germans if they wanted to come in behind us, but since theirs was a largish hire-boat and it was a double-lock, they declined and just wished us good luck.

We got through the double-lock with less hassle than we anticipated, and thought "Oh well, bad luck comes in threes, so now we're OK for the rest of the day". So we continued on without misadventure until we were soon approaching Besançon. After passing through lock 52 at Velotte, we saw the pontoon outside the VNF depot and thought "What a waste of a perfectly good pontoon!", and continued on to the lock at the entrance to Besançon.

We had to wait until the fifth lock of the day for the shit to really hit the fan. It was there, at the entrance to Besançon, that we found that bad luck does not stop at three. As I approached Ecluse 51, I was lined up nicely until the last seconds when a strong cross wind took me outside the line of the lock's inner walls. I realised I wasn’t going to make it, and had no bowthruster to correct it, so I threw it into reverse to go back and try another approach. But as I reversed, the combination of the cross wind and the prop walk in reverse took me even further to the left, toward the middle of the Doubs. As I tried to manoeuvre my way back into the main channel, I felt us bump something and then heard an ominous scraping noise. And then we were going nowhere, high and dry on rocks at right angles to the bank and blocking the entrance to the lock!