Bocholt

From now until further notice, no jokes, pics, photos, etc, please!

We have run out of cheap wifi.  From now on my blogs will probably not be a daily affair.  Belgium, apparently, is not that good when it comes to catering to the itinerant tourist population.  Elsewhere in Europe (e.g.Holland and France) we can get a Lebara SIM card which supplies varying packages of telephone/data at really good prices. 

In Belgium Lebara is "verboden", not allowed, so you are restricted to the package deals from the local service providers, and they are uninspiring to say the least.  After spending €15 on a Mobistar card (€15 of phone calls with 250 Mb of data for "free") we discovered their data only package is €15 for 250Mb.  3 shops later, we were still getting the same message about Mobistar, but finally found a different service provider, Proximus, and they have a card that is data only, €10 for 200 Mb.  What?  That will disappear in couple of days!  But until we find another option that is what we are stuck with.

So, apart from the hunt for a data SIM card, what did we do yesterday?

First off we went by  bike to the  nearest lock (3 km away) to get a cruising permit  for the Flemish part of Belgium.  1 Jan to 30 June for €40 or €75 for a calendar year. 

Ian did his ICC test and the weather forecast was not great: the wind and rain were back again.  And the cold.  The test had to take 2.5 hours (why?) although the actual technical manoeuvres (docking side on and stern on, man overboard, etc) took less than half an hour.  We spent the rest of the time cruising up and down the canal, shooting the breeze with the examiner and having coffee and cookies!  He did the test on Shaun's 12m boat to get a rating for boats up to 24m.  If he had used our own 9m boat he could only get certificate for boats up to 10m.

I had put some washing in to soak the night before, expecting another sunny day. Fortunately by the time I hung it out in the afternoon the rain was gone and at least it dried a little outside in the breeze. Then, we broke out the fan heater,  I hung the laundry in the bathroom and it was all dry by the morning.  Great when you don't have to pay extra for electricity.  And lovely to wake up to a warm boat this morning.