Safe return to St Jean de Losne

On Wednesday 17 September, after just over three and a half months away, we brought Erewhon back into the Gare d’Eau or port at St Jean de Losne two days ahead of our scheduled arrival time. We had intended to spend those two days in Chalon-sur-Saone but man and nature conspired to get in the way.

Ever since the start of our trip we have been very aware of the fact that in order to get back to St Jean de Losne, we would need to come up the Saone, a major river , usually sedate but capable of capricious behaviour in times of rain. We’d seen it in flood at the start of the season and it was in flood again when we met it last week, although fortunately not as badly so. When we came down off the Canal du Centre - and you really do “come down” as the lock at the end is an impressive 10.76 metres high - we found the Saone running swiftly and a bit more than a metre above its usual height. There was also a nasty wind blowing, which never helps when navigating. It was late afternoon when we headed down the river for a couple of kilometres into Chalon sur Saone - not our usual strategic time of arrival and we were to pay the price. When we turned into the port at Chalon and started looking for a mooring spot, we were told that the place was full and that the next possibility was a very small town one and a half hours upriver. At 4:30pm with the river running high, there was every chance that the port there would also be full, so we decided to head back up onto the canal, where we knew we could moor safely. This is the first time we have backtracked and at the start of the season I don’t think I could have imagined the situation of choosing to go up a 10.76 metre high lock! However, we knew the lock to be a gentle giant and the prospect of getting stuck on a running river after dark is enough to change many an idea…

Overnight we decided that we didn’t want to bother with Chalon, the possibility of a still full port and the nasty current flowing through the bridge when you come out of the port, so we left our mooring in time to be the first boat through the giant lock and turned left off the Canal du Centre heading up the Saone towards St Jean de Losne. We were delighted to find the river had dropped noticeably overnight and the wind had dropped as well. It seemed a much friendlier waterway than it had done the night before.

The PK markings on our map, which mark off each kilometre along the waterway, indicated that we had some 70km to cover to get back to St Jean, so we were expecting it to take more than one day of navigating. However, as we moved up the Saone, we found that parts of the river have been shortened by canals over the years and it turned out that the actual distance was just on 55km, which meant that just before 5pm we were happily bringing the boat back into the familiar surroundings of the marina at St Jean de Losne… so familiar in fact that the faces on the pontoon as we came in to moor seemed to be exactly those that were there when we left: Brian and Liz from De Laak, Brian and Maggie on Seabird and Chris (alas without Roger) on Liberte, all looking excited (or was it surprised?) to see us safely back - it felt like coming home to a family! The only people missing were John and Elaine from Taupo but we knew they would be back before we left for our real home in NZ.

Since our return to port, we’ve spent quite a lot of time on catch ups and there are still more of those to go. We’ve also spent a bit of time trying to talk with David Blanquart to discuss the winterising of the boat and the work that we want done to it over the winter. It took a while to find him in his office with some time for us (he’s not one to tie himself down by making appointments) but now that we have done so we know what his staff will take care of and therefore what we need to do. Mostly it is a case of cleaning, drying everything out as much as possible, packing linen and clothing into plastic to protect it from moisture (condensation is always a problem on boats, especially over winter), making sure there is nothing liquid left in the boat that might suffer from freezing - the temperatures here in winter can get as low as -15 degrees so that includes wine as well as all water pipes. We need to sort out food and dispose of / consume anything that won’t cope with 6-7 months in storage and we need to work out what to leave here and what to bring home. We’re hoping that our suitcases for the return trip will not be as heavy as they were coming over.



As well as that, I have secured work (Wellington-based, with a little help from a friend) from early October through until mid-May and we are trying to confirm details of our flights home. When I rang Korean Air yesterday to reconfirm our flights, I was told that it wasn’t at all necessary but I asked them to check anyway - we had had 2 (admittedly minor) changes to our outbound flight even before we left NZ and I wanted to make sure the times were still as we had on our tickets. It’s just as well I did! The young lady was able to confirm the Paris-Seoul leg but then asked if we’d changed the Seoul-Auckland one to the following day. We hadn’t, but it turns out that Korean Air may have… It seems that there is no longer an flight from Seoul to Auckland on the day we are supposed to be travelling. We are now waiting to hear back from the airline with firm details of the bookings - and to find out who gets to pay for the stopover in Seoul if it is required!

Autumn has definitely arrived in this part of the world. Temperatures dropped dramatically with a thunderstorm (yes, another one) a couple of weeks ago and have not gone over the 20 degree mark since. The overnight lows are in the 5-8degree range - the hot water bottle has come out of the cupboard! But we have been lucky all the same - there has been no rain now for a week or so and none is predicted before the weekend when we leave SJL. The equinox has brought us sunny, breezy days (some would say windy but with Wellington as our point of reference we couldn’t agree) - perfect for getting things washed and dried! Tomorrow we take the boat on its last trip for the season to the other side of the boatyard: - a few hundred metres out of the marina and through the first lock on the Canal de Bourgogne. The boat comes out of the water on Thursday morning and we’ll spend our last two nights here in a hotel before leaving for Paris on Saturday morning. There we’ll spend a couple of nights with our lovely friend, Jean-Marc before flying home. When we actually arrive home is in the hands of Korean Air but it will be within a day either side of October 1.

We are both feeling sad as this part of the adventure comes to an end. It has been a fabulous few months and we have learnt so much - there may be another blog entry on that yet. Still, even if it were possible, neither of us fancies the idea of staying in the boat over the winter as some people do - the size of the wood stacks around here tell us all we need to know about the winter temperatures! We are looking forward to seeing family and friends at home and we are already starting to think about where we might take the boat next year.

Catherine

Sunday, 31 August

We have had a lot of wonderful days on the canals this summer and, perhaps not surprisingly, after a while some of them start to merge with others. This morning (31 August) was, however, one right out of the bag. We have been enjoying what may be our most settled spell of weather so far this summer - this is the fifth day of hot, sunny weather on the trot (but thunder storms are once again forecast for later on today). As has been the pattern for the last few days, the day began with mist on the canal and a heavy dew on the boat. We were up and navigating relatively early, leaving our mooring around 9am. There’s no point being on the water sooner as the lockkeepers don’t start work until 9am and the days have hardly begun. For some reason (no doubt related to latitude, longitude and time zones), 9am in France IS actually earlier than 9am in NZ. It s not just a cultural thing as I once thought - the days themselves do not get underway until quite a lot later here. The sun seems to rise later and the early morning coolness takes longer to clear.

It was our last leg on the Canal Lateral a la Loire with just 10km and a single lock between us and the port at Digoin (no, I’d never heard of it either before we started reading canal guides). We set off in the last of the mist on yet another gloriously still morning. I’m sure that only those with recent experience of living in Wellington can truly appreciate the beauty of one windless day after another… The morning was cool but with the promise of heat later in the day and the canal moody with its mist and reflections. We were also both calm and relaxed: one lock in 10km covered today represents a real luxury and all the more so because the locks on this canal (even when locking up) have been more user-friendly than any others we’ve met. The positioning of the bollards seems to be standardised so we know what to expect when we arrive and can set ourselves (and our ropes) up accordingly; the lockkeepers have, without fail, been willing to assist with our ropes if we want them to and the locks themselves - whether through the actual mechanisms or through lockkeeper training - have provided us with a gentle ride up, even when on the rare occasion that we’ve had to share them with another boat. In some of the locks on the Nivernais the ride up was more akin to trying to hold onto a bucking horse!

So, a morning of “mist and mellow fruitfulness” and the canal all to ourselves as it meandered through the French countryside with the Loire river often in view alongside. It’s enough to make anyone want to sing… So sing, we did! We put the Great Tenors (Pavarotti and Domingo) on the tape deck, turned them up loud and sang our way through the countryside with them. Exhilarating stuff!

We didn’t know what to expect of the town of Digoin and its name somehow doesn’t promise much but the entry into the town by canal is a fabulous one. The lock is beside a tree-filled park and with its rise of four metres is the biggest that we’ve encountered on this canal. As you come up in the lock, the Pont-canal de Digoin comes into full view - the canal crosses the river, Loire, by means of a one-way bridge. Footpaths on the sides allow people access across and it is decorated with flower baskets. It is a weird and wonderful experience to cross a river on a canal bridge. This one is like the canal version of a grand avenue leading straight into the heart of town and into the biggest and busiest port we’ve encountered since we left St Jean de Losne. There’s another canal - the 55km Canal de Roanne a Digoin - which branches off here but we’ll leave that for another time. We had considered including it in this trip but, although we probably have time, we don’t want to have to rush and we need to allow ourselves some contingency time: there is always the chance that something might break down and it is possible that we may want to be back in St Jean a bit earlier than planned. Chris is returning to scatter Roger’s ashes on the Saone there and we’d like to be there for that.

Having arrived in port and found ourselves a mooring with electricity, J got on and did the washing while I cooked our Sunday lunch: roast chicken (a favourite) stuffed with leftovers of last night’s fried rice and accompanied by green beans (fresh from the market at Dompierre yesterday) and a creamy mushroom sauce… and a bottle of Cremant de Bourgogne (Burgundy bubbly) that we bought in Bailly a few weeks back. Dessert will be melon from Cavaillon, when we get around to eating it, which may be at dinner time.

Since I began writing this, the weather has broken and we’ve had one downpour complete with wind, thunder, lightning and hailstones. It’s possible there is more to come but we are still sitting in our togs and spending a very mellow afternoon doing gentle activities - reading, playing patience, dozing and writing. We’ll be in Digoin for a week as we meet our friends, Marlene and Margaret here next Sunday., so we are in no rush to get to know the town and we have a few more things to do on the boat. Perhaps a little more brown will disappear over the next few days or maybe we will finally find a way to stop one (or more) of the remaining leaks… And perhaps with the onset of September we’ll also have to face the reality of coming home and looking for work. CV writing and internet job-searching could also be on the agenda for the rest of the week… but I think for now, we’ll just relax and make the most of this last and lovely day of August.

Seeking cyber-space

As you may have gathered by the infrequency of our blog postings and responses to email, one of the great challenges of this way of life is finding ways to access the internet without paying exorbitant amounts for it. 4 euros an hour seems to be the standard rate here but you’ll appreciate that we don’t want to have to pay that too often! It also usually means using someone else’s computer, which is okay for picking up our email, slow-ish for responding as the different position of the letters on the French keyboard slows us both up to a greater or lesser extent and impossible for making blog postings as (understandably), no-one wants us putting our memory stick into their computer for fear of catching some nasty virus. So, for the blog, we really need to pick up a wifi connection of some sort. Easier said than done. It should be said that in the smaller towns (and to be fair, we are talking very small and very rural) there are simply no options at all for public access to the internet.

Here is a summary of how we have managed so far:

St Jean de Losne: theoretically free wifi at Blanquart’s yard where we were moored, never managed to tap into it even though they gave us the password. Did manage to tap into the neighbour’s wifi connection without his knowing and also used to visit kiwi friends, John and Elaine, in H2O’s yard and use their connection, although it was always a bit temperamental.

Menton - free wifi at the hotel which was great until the battery ran out and we realised we hadn’t taken an adapter with us. The hotel had loads of different kinds but not one that would do the trick for us. Very frustrating!

Dijon had options: 4 euros an hour at a cyber-café or have lunch at the Campanile Hotel and use their connection for as long as we liked. We did both at different times. There were supposed to be wifi hotspots at the railway station and at McDonald’s. We tried both but they turned out to only enable you to connect to your local (read French) ISP. Too bad if - like us - you don’t happen to have one!

Bligny sur Ouche: an 8km bike ride from the canal port of Pont d’Ouche to find a beautiful brand spanking new community centre with internet (not wifi) access. Very fast connection and very generous interpretation of the amount of time we spent on the computers.

Montbard - wandered the streets with my brother, Mark, and found an unsecured wifi connection - good for a quick check of the mail but not the most comfortable situation for writing extended replies!

Tonnerre - in a hotspot for Orange (a French ISP) so decided to purchase some time from them so we could work from the boat. Paid 10 euros by credit card and used about half of the three hours that allowed. The username and password, which were supposed to be sent both by email and to the mobile phone have never arrived! (Update: they did arrive - we believe- weeks later via a text message in Danish. Have not yet been back in a suitable Orange hotspot to check and see if they work)

Auxerre - free wifi in the port!!! Aaaaaaaaaa…. What luxury being able to use the computer on the boat for as long as we wanted! Lots of email and several blog updates posted.

Clamecy: free and unlimited wifi in a café in the centre of town (right opposite the Office de Tourisme). The coffee was even good too so repeat visits were in order and we were able to have a good catch up there.

Corbigny had a free wifi connection at the Office de Tourisme, which was closed the first time we went to visit (a Monday) but we managed from the steps outside. The second time we had the luxury of a dedicated room with a table and chairs… but limited time in and around haircuts and preparations for our next set of visitors.

The Office de Tourisme at Decize also had free wifi - but no space at all dedicated to using it. We stood outside with Emilee (our computer) perched on a fence and did what we could. It wasn’t exactly conducive to good, long communications however.

Digoin, where we have stopped for a week in preparation for our last set of visitors for this season, has 4-euro-an-hour internet at the Office de Tourisme but also free wifi in a café at the other end of town. We think we might also find some nearer to the port and with any luck, that’s where I’ll be making this posting from… (No, in fact we are back at the original cafe/restaurant having just had a steak and chips lunch - a rare treat - and it is bucketing down outside. We might be here for a while...)

Marlene and Margaret, our visitors, will be staying with us for two weeks so there will be less than usual time for log writing. Once they have gone, we’ll be back in St Jean de Losne and preparing the boat for the winter and ourselves for our return home. Hopefully, we’ll be able to find the wifi connection at Blanquart’s or we’ll just have to befriend someone moored at H20... (or sit on the step outside their office, as others have been seen to do)