Two lovely days in Strasbourg... in brief

We arrived in Souffelweyersheim, the last port before Strasbourg, on Friday 24th at lunchtime. The next day we decided to cycle the 10 km into Strasbourg and spend the day there rather than trying to take the boat in with little or no chance of finding a decent mooring. What a lovely day it turned out to be. We left at 8am and thoroughly enjoyed the ride there stopping to take photographs along the way, especially of the European Parliament building. This fabulous structure cannot be done justice with a photo, it has to be seen to be believed. We arrived at the famous -and fabulous - cathedral just before nine and went straight inside. A good move as it happened as we largely missed out on hordes of guided tours. There is simply too much to try and take in with just one visit. One of the most astounding things to see is the astrological clock. This structure dating from the 16th century is easily 10 metres high with many displays including the time, day, month, season, day on the religious calendar. It is still in perfect working order and is an engineering triumph, as indeed is the cathedral itself, which would rate as one of the most beautiful we have ever seen.

After visiting the Office de Tourisme to get a map and any other useful information, we wandered the streets. Saturday is market day in Strasbourg and most streets in the centre of the city are traffic free and have all manner of stalls. J had her very first tarte flambee for lunch which she thoroughly enjoyed. (It’s like a pizza but with crème fraiche, bacon, onion and cheese - so what’s not to like?! Wouldn‘t get the Heart Foundation tick however…) Lunch was followed by a wander through La Petite France which is ancient and charming. There are waterways in all directions and brightly-painted half-timbered houses dating back to the Middle Ages. The civil engineering works of Vauban are worth looking at, he has left reminders of his genius - usually by way of fortifications - in many of the places we have visited.

At one stage we had thought we might take Erewhon into the centre of Strasbourg but after looking around we decided there was no advantage in doing that so flagged the idea away.

On the Tuesday, still moored in Souffelweyersheim, we decided to cycle to Germany. ie cycle to the Rhine and over the pedestrian and cycle bridge into Germany. This was so much easier than we thought it would be because 99% of the trip was on well-maintained cycle paths which, because they largely follow the canal and river are flat. France and Germany have co-operated to develop a lovely garden on both sides of the Rhine linked by the beautiful cycle/pedestrian bridge. The idea is that it demonstrates the willingness to maintain meaningful dialogue between the two countries. The Rhine was running very quickly - so fast in fact we were pleased our plans to travel to Strasbourg via the Rhine were thwarted. A HUGE heavily laden barge went downstream while we were there. It was travelling very, very quickly indeed! The blunt bow displaced a surprising level of water in front of it which then travelled the full length of the barge like a series of large waves. The amount of water that then rose high at the stern like a rooster’s tail was indeed formidable. We understand our 6 tonne boat needs a minimum of 48hp to navigate the Rhine. We have 50hp - a bit too marginal for our liking. Having said that, the previous owners had a quick trip down the Rhine and lived to tell the tale.

From the Rhine we cycled back into Strasbourg to see a few sights we didn’t see on the Friday, mending a tyre puncture on the way. By the time we cycled back to the boat, we‘d completed a wonderful 30km journey, leaving us a little saddle sore and with no desire to ride our bikes for a day or so.

What a day!

Tuesday 21st July was a day with many parts to it. It would certainly count as one of our most stressful…

It all began innocently enough. We had spent a lovely evening and night in the pretty village of Lutzelbourg and woke up reasonably early ready for a morning run through to Saverne. We did an engine check and while I swabbed down the dew-drenched deck C made a lovely breakfast of mushrooms on toast. We were at the lock at 8.15am, as arranged with the lock keeper the night before, and were delighted to find we were sharing the lock with only one small boat. As we were leaving the lock, a Dutchman called out to us that there was a New Zealand boat in the port in Saverne. At the time, we attached little importance to this announcement. Little did we know just how significant it would turn out to be.

Everything was going like a dream when, as we were entering the fourth lock behind the other boat, I put the boat into gear and there was the most sickening bang and growl from near the stern of the boat. I quickly put the boat into neutral and, as the other boat was in the lock waiting, I gingerly tried to put the boat into gear. She responded normally. We drifted slowly into the lock, C caught the bollard easily (we were locking down) and I put the motor in reverse to avoid climbing into the stern of the boat in front only to find no response at all! We were very close to the other boat and I quickly told C to stop the boat using the rope which fortunately she was able to do. While we were locking down, we discussed what we were going to do and decided we would let the other boat know we had a problem and we would limp along slowly in forward gear. However, when it came to leaving the lock we couldn’t move forwards or backwards. We were stranded in an empty lock.

A kind passing cyclist helped us to manoeuvre the boat to where C could climb the vertical greasy ladder (something she normally refuses to even consider) and make a call to the V.N.F. We knew there was every chance that another boat would activate the automatic lock and we would have the lock filling with our boat facing the wrong way - not the most welcome of prospects. While Catherine was making the phone call that is exactly what happened. We had secured the boat aft, mid and stern to keep her as stable as possible. I was in the lock by myself trying to make sure the boat didn’t bounce around too much. Quite scary really but not at all life threatening.

Imagine the surprise the two waiting boats got when the lock gates opened and they saw a boat pointing the wrong way! However, in true boating style, they backed up, moored their own boats and helped us to drag our boat out backwards and out of the way. It was a 15-20 minute bike ride to Saverne, the nearest port, so we tied our boat up to some bollards. We were lucky enough to be stuck in a spot where there were bollards to tie up to. C went off on her bike to see if we could get some mechanical assistance or at least the contact details of a local boat mechanic. (The V.N.F. said they do not get involved in these problems, their job is to keep the locks working.) She also took a pack and a shopping list as there was every possibility that we would be stuck there for a day or two. We knew the problem wasn’t the motor but for whatever reason the propeller wasn’t turning. At worst, we knew this might mean the boat having to come out of the water. We didn’t know where the nearest crane was and we knew the bank account could take a real hiding.

While C was off on her mission, I tried to think what the problem could be. I decided to check the stuffing box in case that was damaged and letting in water. I wanted to make sure we weren’t slowly sinking! That all seemed to be in order. It was hard to settle to do anything and at times like this your imagination can be overactive.

While I was trying to read my book there was the welcome sound of C returning with two kiwis, Adie and Lorna. C had noticed the NZ flag on their very nice barge and decided to ask them if they had any idea where one could get some assistance. When I was introduced to them, Adie said he wasn’t a mechanic but offered to have a look and see if there was anything he could do. He quickly verified the motor was working as it should but the propeller shaft was not. He then lifted the engine hatch and the problem was readily identified. A shaft comes out of the motor, and with a couple of plates and a ball and socket joint, is coupled to the propeller shaft. There are four bolts that hold the two plates together. He found one bolt had just sheared off with part of it still stuck in the hole and there was no sign at all of the other three bolts. He fossicked around in the oily/watery bilge and found all three of the missing bolts along with a few other unrelated items that had been dropped down there over the years. We have no idea how long the boat had been running with only one bolt holding the two plates together.

Boats are not always easy to work on; it is awkward to get to where problems are. Because the motor was replaced five years ago we seem to have a mish-mash of metric and imperial fittings - and a huge selection, some of which sometime fit the existing fittings. For all that, after nearly two hours from whoa to go, Adie had the boat back in working order. He was able to secure the two plates together with the help of an Allen key borrowed from the boat moored next to us. True, we have only three instead of four bolts holding the plates together but that is probably three times more than we had before!

Adie and Lorna kindly cycled abreast of us all the way in to Saverne in case we had a problem and needed to throw a rope to someone on shore. It was 4pm when we got to Saverne and there were no mooring spaces left but Adie and Lorna had fortunately invited us to raft up to their lovely barge called Ariana. C and I then had a quick bite to eat - breakfast was 8 hours earlier - and tried to re-hydrate ourselves as the temperature had been very hot all day. We’d invited Adie and Lorna to join us for a special “thank you” dinner on our boat and so we put our packs on our backs and walked to the supermarket to look for special ingredients. Lorna is a vegetarian so we had a curry planned for her and we found the best eye fillet steak for Adie. After nibbles and champagne we had a delicious platter of crudities, the main, cheeses and a fresh strawberry flan C made. We managed to do the shopping and have the meal prepared in just under two hours.

It was a magic evening, the air cooled down to a comfortable temperature and the view from the boat was stunning. At 11pm we said goodnight to our guests who only had to step back on to their own boat and we went to bed absolutely exhausted - physically and emotionally. A few hours later I woke up with a painful cramp in my leg, the result of hours of perspiring probably, which also woke up C. We were just settling down to go back to sleep when there was a violent wind storm. The noise of the flags and cockpit flapping on our boat to say nothing of the noise from all around us was huge. We were tethered fore, mid and aft to the barge and the ropes were tugging quite forcefully. We got up and checked everything as best we could. C rescued the mop off the gunnels. Other boaties - in various states of undress - were doing the same. Our herb planter was knocked over making a disconcerting thud on the roof and we hoped the two boat hooks would stay well tucked in to their possie on the deck. (They did) This lasted for nearly an hour and by then it was 5am. Tired as we were it was really difficult to get back to sleep.

Adie and Lorna made an early start to head to Lutzelbourg which meant that we had to untie ourselves from their boat, move out of the way and then thankfully move back onto the quayside in their space. Adie is confident his repairs to the boat will be sufficient until we return to St Jean de Losne when the sheared bolt will have to be removed and replaced. We know we have had a lucky escape financially and we have learnt a lot from this experience. And most of all, we count our blessings that C stopped to chat to fellow kiwis!

PS We were disappointed we didn’t manage to take one relevant photo to accompany this post. We were just too busy and distracted!

Nancy

When a native speaker of English looks at a map of France, Nancy is one of the place names (like Paris and Nice) that jumps out at you. I suppose it is because of the familiarity of the word in unexpected surroundings. For us, Nancy (pronounced more like ‘nonsee’ than the English girl’s name) has been our first destination since we left St-Jean-de-Losne in June, canal closures in September having forced a re-think even before that. “We’ll go up the Saone and the Canal des Vosges to Nancy and then we’ll make up our minds about where to go from there depending on time and what people tell us.” It was also to be our point of rendez-vous with C’s German friends, Uli and Detlef, who were to join us on the boat for a few days and jointly celebrate Bastille Day. We’d made those arrangements at a couple of weeks’ notice.

Nancy has a unique situation, lying on a circle in the waterways that is made up of the Nancy Branch Canal, part of the Moselle and a section of the Marne-Rhine Canal. Like St-Jean-de-Losne, it gives access to numerous possible itineraries on the waterways - to Strasbourg, to Luxembourg, to Germany, to the north of France and to the east, as well as south from whence we had come. The shortest - and most obvious - way for us to go to Nancy was to take the Nancy Branch Canal - a 14km trip from near the top of the Canal des Vosges. We’d had countless conversations about our intentions with boaties, port personnel, lockkeepers and other staff of the VNF (who look after the waterways) but it wasn’t until we got to Epinal, just 50km from the turn-off, that we were told that the Branch Canal was closed due to some form of blockage. You would have thought someone might have mentioned it sooner! Perhaps there might have been a notice or two posted at a lock along the way, or perhaps some information on the VNF website - but no, nothing. It would be understandable if the closure was recent - these things can happen quite suddenly - but it had been closed since May 2008!

We would have enjoyed a longer, leisurely stay in Epinal, where mooring costs just 4 euros a night and includes water, electricity and showers, and where the city is compact enough to be easily manageable and big enough to offer a full range of shops and services. What’s more, the people who ran the port there were amongst the loveliest we have met. But with people to meet, we now had a deadline for getting to Nancy and 54km had just been added to our journey!

In fact, we made it comfortably as a large proportion of the extra distance was on the Moselle and you can go faster on rivers than canals - firstly because there is no speed limit (other than that of the boat, which is still quite limited!) and there are many fewer locks. That said, these are huge commercial locks and the lockkeepers have the right to make pleasure craft wait for up to two hours if there are water shortages or (seemingly), if they happen to be having a bad day.

We arrived in Nancy around mid-morning on the 11th of July, the perfect time to find a mooring, even in a busy port even in the height of the holiday period. That gave us a couple of days to rest a little, clean up, do the laundry, get in supplies and familiarise ourselves with the city before Uli and Detlef arrived.

It was the first time in Nancy for both of us; in fact, for all of us and I think we were all pretty impressed. The capital of the region of Lorraine is a beautiful city, relatively flat and very cycle-friendly, well set out with lots of well-developed public spaces and gardens. Its most striking feature, is the Place Stanislas - an enormous, formally laid-out open square featuring a beautiful ensemble of municipal buildings, statues, fountains and, of course, many cafes. The square and the surrounding old part of the city are recognised by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site.


I think it’s fair to say that our stay in Nancy was marked by two things: “sound and light”, and languages. On our guests’ first night with us, we decided to go and see the Sound and Light show, which takes place at the Place Stanislas every evening in summer at 10:45pm. We got the extended version! The sheet lightning started well before the show did, lighting up the sky in all directions, and we will swear that the first raindrop fell at exactly the moment the real show started. We watched the wondrously imaginative projections on the front of the town hall building under umbrellas accompanied by booming thunder, more lightning and pounding rain, which eased off to nothing just as the show came to an end. Talk about impeccable timing!
We were “treated” to more rain and thunderstorms the following day and abandoned the idea of going to see the planned 14th of July fireworks display. We were almost certain that it would be cancelled because of the weather and none of us really fancied the idea of another late-night drenching. The fireworks did take place, however, and one of us managed to ignore the sound effects as we tried to go off to sleep…


Languages were a feature of the stay because C and Uli have always used French to communicate - both being French teachers and having met during a course for French teachers. J manages in survival French and has no German; Detlef has no French and very limited English but does pretty well in international sign and body language. C has very rusty German which got pushed into action through necessity during the visit. Needless to say, conversations were a confusing mish-mash of all three languages - sometimes with bits of all three featuring in the one sentence. Fortunately the desire to understand and be understood was equally strong all round and it is amazing what an asset that can be to such multi-lingual and multi-cultural conversations! To add to the experience, we had navigated the last leg through to Nancy with a lovely German couple, Claus and Irene. Both spoke excellent English as well as German, of course, and Irene could add French, Dutch and Indonesian to the mix. We had drinks together on two evenings; the first hosted on our boat, the second on theirs. The conversation flowed as fast as the drinks in all directions and switching across the three languages - it was both manic and magic! We left Nancy after six enjoyable days and made the decision to head for Strasbourg.

C with Uli and Detlef

Locked up

One day we’ll write a post which looks at the relative merits of river cruising and canal cruising but one of the greatest differences is that canals have more locks. To give you an idea: so far this year, we have travelled nearly 200km up the Saone (including the occasional detour) and encountered 20 locks along the way. In the 67km we have so far travelled on the Canal des Vosges, we have been through 60 locks. Most of them are automatic - set in motion by a combination of a remote control unit, which registers your presence upstream or downstream of the lock and your wish to pass through the it, and a vertical pole recessed into the lock wall, which you lift up to activate the filling or emptying of the lock.

On this canal, the locks have been relatively standard: you “step” up or down around 3 metres at each one, the position of the bollards has been more or less consistent and in all but 2 of the locks the mechanism was on the same side. All these factors are important in terms of working out how to approach the lock. We could manage the 3m step up with both of us on the boat but it was towards our limit. When we came across a series of 5 locks with a step up of between 3.25 and 3.5 metres, we decided to take our alternative approach, which involves C on a bicycle dropping a rope down to J in the boat.

As we approached the fourth lock in the series - lock number 25, called La Colosse but actually one of the smaller of the five - we were met with two red lights, which means that the lock is “Not in service” for some reason, always unknown to us. We have yet to be told of any recommended course of action when this occurs so we waited. After what seemed like a respectable amount of waiting time, C cycled up to the lock to use the intercom there to contact the navigation services (VNF) but a VNF van pulled up at the same time with three men inside. One of them told C that there was a problem with the lock but then played with a few buttons on the control panel (which is locked inside a little hut at the lock) and we were presented with a green light and open doors. With all seeming to be in order, the VNF van drove off.

We set the boat up in the lock, pushed the lever to set it in motion and almost immediately saw another boat coming round the corner behind us. If we had known they were there, we would have waited for them and locked up together but having set the lock in motion, there was nothing we could do to stop it except pull the red emergency lever - and the situation didn’t seem to warrant that! The lock doors started to close and we waited for the lock to begin to fill. And we kept waiting…

When it was obvious that the lock wasn’t going to fill (and we’d given another push or two on the lever just to make sure that we hadn’t somehow muffed the process in the first instance), C did get to use the intercom system to alert the VNF to the problem and the person she finally got to speak to assured her that they would send someone “tout de suite”. When something goes wrong on the waterways, the worst thing is often not knowing what the problem is nor what you might be expected to do in response to it. For this reason, C biked off to communicate the situation to the agitated Germans in the boat behind and then to the somewhat more relaxed Irish couple in the barge, Tara, which had since appeared upstream.

And so we waited…and waited…and waited; J in the boat in the bottom of the lock, C with her bike at the top of it. By the time at least 45 minutes - and midday - had passed, C tried the intercom again to see if some sort of update might be possible but it steadfastly refused to allow her to communicate with anyone. (The call had been registered; perhaps they’d then switched the thing off.) In a further lack-of-progress update with the captain of Tara, C suggested that if he had a mobile phone, maybe he could use that to ring the VNF again and innocently inform them of a problem at the lock from his newly-arrived-upstream perspective. He’d agreed to do just that when, right on cue, a VNF van pulled up - this time with just one man inside but the right one. He was in charge of the 10-lock sector and he swung into action immediately.

First of all he asked us to move forward in the lock to make room for the German boat. He opened the doors and they tied up at the back of the lock. Their boat was a small one we didn’t have to move far to make room. The next step was to close the doors, which he tried to do but they never fully closed. After many unsuccessful attempts, he surmised that the problem was a rock or stone in the way of the lock doors, probably thrown up by a barge which had passed us just as we were coming out of one of the earlier locks. It seems that if barges accelerate too quickly out of locks, they can throw up all sorts of things that had previously been resting harmlessly on the canal floor. The barge pilots are therefore requested to go gently out of the locks but this one had ignored the request. There was nothing for it but for our VNF chief to head away to the next lock in his van to get a suitable implement to clear the stone from the lock doors.

While he was away, I kept providing updates to those around: in awfully rusty German to our neighbours in the lock, who spoke very little French and even less English, to the captain of Tara, who passed them on to the growing collection of boats upstream and to a very relaxed Dutch couple, who had arrived at the lock from below.

The VNF man returned after a short time with something that looked like this:

As you might imagine, this is not the easiest tool in the world to use, especially not alone, from a height of around four metres above the water line and at least two below it, and in sweltering heat! We watched as he made repeated gallant attempts to clear the offending stone and were impressed and optimistic when he finally pulled up a large concrete block from the depths. With NZ and French fingers crossed and German thumbs pressed for good luck, our VNF man had another go at the control panel. But no, the doors jammed at exactly the same point, just millimetres short of being fully closed.

At this point, more serious help was obviously needed in the form of scuba divers, so this was once again a job for the fire brigade. The VNF man put in the call and then left to meet the divers, who would be coming from Epinal, a good 20-30 minutes away. After another bike ride up and downstream with the latest update, we decided it was time to have some lunch. J prepared a salad in the boat, put C’s in a bowl inside a plastic bag and C was able to drop down the rope to attach it to so she could bring it up to the top of the lock.

Meanwhile, our 3 VNF men in a van from the beginning of the saga appeared on the scene once more. They valiantly tried to resolve the problem by:
a) repeatedly opening and closing the door using the controls in the hut
b) having a go at clearing the obstacle with the giant rake
c) sending one man into the water for a dive to see if he could clear things that way.

While the last attempt was in progress, the Sapeurs-Pompiers van arrived from Epinal. In true French fashion, he got out of the van, greeted each of the VNF employees with a handshake and was provided with a full update on the situation. No problem, he said, as soon as his colleague arrived, he would be in the water and sure to have the blockage cleared. For health and safety reasons, he was not allowed to dive until a suitably qualified colleague was present to assist him - and that colleague had to come from Vittel. (It should be noted that this is possibly the first obvious example of safe workplace practice we have witnessed in France, a land where no-one seems to have heard of masks, safety goggles or ear muffs and where VNF employees dive happily into the canal to try to free up the lock gates with blatant disregard for any rules to the contrary.) Given that the arrival of the van from the fire brigade had raised expectations of action up and downstream of the lock as well as in it, C decided that another multi-lingual communication mission was in order to lower those expectation to a more reasonable level.

Around 25 minutes later, the fireman from Vittel arrived, got out of his van, greeted his colleague from Epinal and each of the VNF employees with a handshake and received his update on the situation. Now supervised not only by his colleague from Vittel but also by four VNF employees, several boaties and a couple of passing cyclists, the diver from Epinal finally went into the water. After no more than about 5 minutes, he had filled a large bucket with fist-sized pieces of building material and announced that that seemed to be everything.

So, just over three hours after J first entered the lock, there we all were again waiting for the lock doors to close with French and kiwi fingers crossed and German thumbs pressed…and yes, this time it did work. The lock duly filled and J was finally out of there! No updates were needed at this point - the passing boats and changing lights at the locks told the waiting boaties all they needed to know. As for us, well, we completed the last of the five high locks without incident and immediately started to look for a suitable mooring for the night. All that inaction in sweltering heat had taken its toll - we needed a rest!

Days of our Lives

A few days ago we moored for the evening at a safe spot just through lock number 30. In many ways it was an unremarkable ‘wild’ mooring. However, we were moored against a user-friendly wooden platform, long enough for two boats (a Swiss boat was next door). There were good rings to tie the boat up to and a supply of good quality water. All of this was free. So far as we know the locals have provided this for the benefit of boaties knowing there could be a spin off for the community.

It was a fairly strenuous 3-4km cycle into Bains-les-Bains starting with a long uphill slog. Part of the journey was in the shade of a forest, the next part was past newly mown hay. It is quite an experience to be gulping in warm air heavily scented with the smell of freshly cut hay as you struggle to get to the top of the rise. We checked out the Office du Tourisme for local info and wifi options, (where we successfully checked email messages also for free) and wandered about the village to learn about some of the impressive history. After all, our cycling took us along a road named, ‘La Voie Romaine’. As the name of the village suggests, Bains-les-Bains is famous for its baths (like the city of Bath in England). Apparently Roman soldiers noticed steam rising from the ground and set to and developed the resource, which became quite famous.

We also checked out the supermarket. With our back packs and bicycle baskets well laden with purchases, we relished the downhill ride back to the boat. When we got back we did our favourite quick-and-easy cooling down manoeuvre which is to change into togs and pour buckets of cold water over each other. This is followed by sitting in the shade, in our wet togs and enjoying a cool drink. As we were quietly sipping our evening drink, an amazing sight came into view. Words cannot do justice to describe the craft that tied up 30 metres behind our boat. The photo will give you some idea of why we were so taken with this astonishing craft. It can only be described as a nautical version of a gypsy caravan. Every bit of space on the deck was covered with all manner of clutter. It looked very top heavy and we wondered how it could possibly cope with some of the more difficult locks.



There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason for the price structure of the moorings. Some are free and include water, electricity and showers. Some have a graduated price structure i.e. a basic mooring charge, with extra for water, extra for power, extra for showers. Some charge a flat rate so you may as well hitch up to power and top up your water. Sometimes the Office du Tourisme staff are proactive in this area, convincing the local authorities to provide mooring, power and water for free on the basis it would encourage boaties to stay and spend money in the village. Last year we spent a week in Tonnerre with mooring, power and water for free. At that port you can stay for free for up to 3 weeks, and yes, we did spend money buying materials for work to be done on the boat and, of course, food.

We stayed in Epinal for three nights partly because we were tired and partly because we were so warmly welcomed by the Capitainerie and partly because the mooring, which included power, water and showers cost only 4 euros a night. We might well have stayed longer and done some work on the boat but we had arranged to meet friends in Nancy and couldn’t hang around too long. The day we arrived we had had a longish day which started with a trip to the supermarket in Girancourt. We used our Ikea trolley to cart our gas bottle to refill and borrowed the supermarket trolley to cart 60 litres of diesel back to the boat. We then went through our last ‘up’ lock for a while and motored 11 km across the top of the Canal des Vosges before going down a staircase of 14 locks. Halfway through there was a brief but spectacular thunderstorm. Because the locks are set up for you, you really have no choice but to just keep going but it did mean that C got a bit of a soaking. Fortunately, we had no trouble with the locks in this stretch of the canal. It was wonderful to creep into a strange port and have a gentleman wave us into a mooring spot and then help us to tie up. It was even more wonderful to hear how cheap the moorings would be - with everything included!

We were near the centre of the town with ready access to shops. There were gaily coloured tents next to the port in preparation for a sizeable cycle race the next day. We enjoyed watching an interesting troubadour with donkey and cart walking along the quayside playing jolly tunes on a recorder. (The troubadour was the one playing the recorder not the donkey.) Quite medieval really.


Currently we are close to the German-French border and thankfully in an area where there are no hire boats on the canal. This means less competition for mooring spots and a little less to worry about - hire boats are not fabulous to share locks with. Some boats are piloted by people who allow quite young children to steer boats into locks with some unfortunate collisions. Even worse, those parents do not see any reason for the recipient boat owner to get tetchy. I would like to see their reaction if a child drove into their car back home and most boats would be worth many times the value of a family car!

Apart from the lovely Bruce and Sue from the US that we moored next to in Auxonne, we have not met native speakers of English. There are many speakers of French, as you would expect, German, Dutch, Swiss dialects and fewer others eg Spanish, Italian and some Eastern European countries. Last year we met many more people who could speak English. Fortunately Catherine has the French well and truly under her belt and her revision of the German language is going ahead in leaps and bounds. Spending three hours stuck in a lock with a German couple gave Catherine’s German a real boost.

While it is true we have had the odd bit of bad weather we have, on the whole, had wonderful sunny days, many of them very very hot with temperatures in the 30s. As I write, we are moored in Charmes, a village that has not had a charmed life. According to the guide it has over the centuries suffered repeated invasions, sackings, famines and plagues. Very little in the way of ancient buildings remain and those that do are treasured. It is an unusually cool and showery day so we are making the most of the opportunity to get some jobs done without breaking out in an uncomfortable sweat. We have arranged to meet friends in Nancy so will have to continue navigating soon, it may be that the friends will have to meet us in Toul. We try to be accurate with our estimations of where we will be at any time but some things are out of our control eg weather and troublesome locks which cause unavoidable delays. Our timetable is very much an inexact science.

Oops!

Thursday, 21 June - the front page of “L’Est Républicain”, the regional newspaper, reported a boat running aground at Ray-sur-Saône and that they had to be rescued by a team of emergency services divers.(In France, these services are provided by the fire brigade - the sapeurs pompiers - rather than by the police as would be the case in NZ.) The article went on to explain that the main reason that the boat ran aground was a lack of water and because one of the buoys, which shows where the navigation channel is, had been torn out by another boat the previous week and not yet been replaced.




We felt a particular empathy for the German couple at the centre of the story because just days earlier we had run aground at exactly the same spot. Unlike them, however, we neither had to spend a night on board our boat while stuck in the middle of the river, nor did we have to call in the emergency services.

We ran aground on a Sunday morning just as we were leaving Ray and we were travelling very slowly because J was aware that the water wasn’t very deep in places. Neither of us knew that a navigation buoy was missing, so we thought we were headed in the right direction when we heard the unmistakable sound of the boat scraping the bottom. J cut the motor instantly and there we were, stuck in the middle of the Saône with about 20 metres of water on either side but barely half a metre underneath. So, what next?

After a bit of discussion, we decided the best option was for one of us to get into the water and see how deep it was and if we could free the boat by pushing it. Long legs seem to be a pre-requisite for wading birds, so you can guess which of us got that job. It was on with my togs and into the water - via our wonderful, new, strong platform at the stern. The depth of the water on entry surprised me as it was well over my waist and we are only supposed to draw 60cm - at that depth there shouldn’t have been a problem. However, as I made my way around the side of the boat, the water level quickly dropped - or more accurately, a shoal of gravel on the river bed rose quite steeply - and it wasn’t long before the water barely reached mid-thigh. It was obvious, then, to see why we were stuck. After a bit of a struggle and some redistribution of the weight on board, I was able to swing the boat around into the channel and get myself back on board the boat. Whew!

At this point, a couple of Danish men in a hire boat, came past and kindly offered us assistance by way of a tow line. We accepted it willingly, even though the time of greatest need had past and held onto it until we obviously had a good line through the channel.

To begin with, we were a bit embarrassed at having run aground. We thought we must have done something wrong. We felt a bit better after we spoke to a boatie in Savoyeux a day or two later and he mentioned the missing buoy, and shamefully, we felt better still after we read the article in the newspaper.