Fintele

Deck done.  This is one job we have been dying to do but needed good weather. Today was full on summer - 27 degrees in the shade.   It is a pity it happened just days before we leave and so we'll not have time to finish the job with top coat paint.

No more patches!

This morning I took a walk and found another of those strange beehive shaped information huts. 

Until 1990 there was a temporary wooden bridge, the Hooipiete, across the Ijzer river at this point. 

The farmers built it from scratch every year in the summer when they kept their livestock on the low lying land on the opposite side of the river from the town.  This is the area that floods during the winter so the bridge was only needed for a few months of the year.  But every time a boat came by they had to take the bridge apart and rebuild it after the boat had passed!  in the summer of 1990 they rebuilt the bridge 65 times.  And now it is no more due to increasing numbers of pleasure boats and bigger farm machinery which was too heavy for the little wooden bridge.  The position it used to be in is marked by metal beams

and there is a replica built across a dead end channel about 50m from where the old bridge used to stand.

Another interesting thing we found out is that these waterways have been used commercially since the 13th century, long before anyone had invented locks.  The Ijzer river is 70cm higher than the Lo Canal and there is a dike between them.  To move boats from one waterway into the other they had a huge 8m high wheel that pulled the boats over greased rollers up the one slope and eased it down the other.  

The windless system was replaced by the lock as we know it in the 1820s when the Lo Canal was deepened and straightened 

but it was blown up in the Second World War, and rebuilt exactly as it was.

Just as an afterthought: how not to tie up a boat