Somewhere in Unoccupied France

Well, St Jean de Losne actually.  A small town on the River Saone about 25 miles South East of Dijon.  It isn’t in the “Rough Guide to France” and I would guess most French people haven’t heard of it either.  But, to the waterways community it’s a major centre close to the junction of a number of rivers and canals which stretch across Europe.  It’s a place where working barges come to die, rusting in the docks here and where Brits and other eccentrics trade pleasure boats of all shapes and sizes.  We’re resting up in the marina here after an exhausting trip from the channel ports.

I’ve known in theory that France is much bigger than the UK since I started French lessons at school.  It’s one of those first things you learn – that the UK would fit into France “x” times, though it has a similar sized population.  However, travelling through the country from one end to the other at the pace of a slow jogger really rams home the practical reality – France is big, really big and by comparison with the UK the population rattles around in it.  After two weeks slogging through the canals of the industrial North Sue picked up a promotional leaflet jauntily entitled “Marne – the Champagne effect” which cheerfully illustrated that Reims (where we had just arrived) was about sixty miles closer to London than to Lyon.

La Fulica started this trip as a rather respectable yacht, but she has rapidly started to acquire the character of a long-term liveaboard boat – basically a water-borne gypsy caravan.  Her mast is now lying on top of the cabin roof and the decks and cabin roof are littered with useful junk – mooring ropes of various lengths and descriptions, twenty five meters of hosepipe, for topping up the water tanks at every available opportunity, a jerrycan for picking up diesel from nearby garages, towels and other clothes drying and a white tarpaulin rigged up over the cockpit to provide some shelter from the frequent rainstorms.  The only things missing to complete the picture are a lurcher and a couple of grubby half-naked children.  It all seems a long way from Calais.

As I suggested in my first newsletter we didn’t hang around in Calais for the Canal de Calais to reopen, but on Friday 26th July we set off up the coast for Dunkirk.  Because Calais is such a busy ferry port the Harbour Master at the Port de Plaisance lets boats out of the marina about once an hour for the period around high tide at times when ferry activity is reasonably quiet.  Basically, a fleet of small boats gathers and sails up and down the marina dock until the Harbour Master opens the bridge that separates the marina from the rest of the harbour.  As the bridge opens a combined yacht and power boat race begins with everyone pelting hell for leather for the harbour entrance to get out of the way of the ferries, before fanning out in their various directions, across the Channel, down towards Boulogne or up to Dunkirk, Belgium and Holland.

After this initial excitement we had an excellent three-hour motor-sail up the coast in sunny weather, arriving in Dunkirk harbour in mid afternoon and tying up at the Yacht Club de Mer du Nord, where we spent a few days getting the boat ready before picking our way through Dunkirk Docks and onto the canal system on my birthday, Monday 29th July.

Our first week on the canals was spent on the waterways of the industrial North which are very busy with commercial traffic and have few pleasure boats.  After a sweltering start as we left Dunkirk the weather steadily deteriorated and the whole thing was a stressful slog in grey and wet weather, counting locks and miles on our journey to the South.  By Saturday 3rd August we were exhausted and decided to stay in a small “marina” in the town of Chauny not far from Laon, for rest and recuperation and a hot shower or two.  At the start of the week we had grand plans to take in Paris and the highly scenic Canal de Borgogne on our journey South, but by the Saturday we were determined to get south by a shorter route leaving out Paris and the Borgogne.  This turned out to be a highly fortunate decision as unknown to us as this point the French Waterways network was having its worst summer for water shortages since 1976 and the Canal de Borgogne was about to be or was already closed to through traffic.

After a rest at Chauny in our second week we travelled through Reims and the Champagne country to the start of the Marne a Saone canal at Vitry le Francois.  Again the weather was grey although the canals were generally smaller with less commercial and more leisure traffic.

Our third week was basically spent on the much more rural Marne a Saone canal, which follows the River Marne up seventy odd locks to its source near Langres, through a three mile long tunnel and then down another forty odd locks to the River Saone at Pontailler.  From Pontailler it took us half a day to sweep the twenty or so miles down river to St Jean de Losne.  Most of this time we have had blazing hot sun, which has somewhat mellowed our perception of the French inland waterways.

In terms of distance we are not much more than half way through our 640-mile journey from the Channel to the Med, but we have gone through 189 of the 214 locks that stand in our way.  What remains is a long run down the broad Saone and Rhone rivers with the stream flowing with us to the South, maybe only another ten days.

In the three and a bit weeks of the canals we have had many high and lows already and many people have shown us kindness.

The two biggest highs have both had a musical flavour.  In Dunkirk the Yacht Club de Mer du Nord has a very active social scene and we got to know the couple on the neighbouring yacht, Daniel and Micheline and their friends Andre and Marie-Pierre.  I asked Andre if he knew how best to find our way thorough the network of docks at Dunkirk onto the canal.  He didn’t, but insisted on driving me to Dunkirk Port Control on a Sunday lunchtime.  There in the big Conning Tower overlooking Dunkirk Port the solemn uniformed officials of Port Control kindly took me through the route and the formalities.  After much handshaking and thank yous I naturally bought Andre a drink, which led on to a boozy lunchtime session during which Andre explained that he was a fairly accomplished bagpipe player, both Scots and French.  One thing led to another and that afternoon we decided to lower La Fulica’s mast in readiness for the canals to a bagpipe accompaniment from Andre.  The whole thing turned into something of a spectacle with Andre blowing for all he was worth and Marie-Pierre, Micheline, Daniel and many others looking on as the mast was lowered by Sue and I.  When it finally hit the horizontal there was a flourish on the pipes from Andre and a rousing cheer from most of the boats in the marina.

At Chaumont on the Marne a Saone we tied up at the local marina for the night next to a Greek fishing boat, complete with white and blue paintwork and a Greek flag.  Later we met the owner, Eliane, half Greek, half Belgian and her crew, a Belgian environmental consultant called Daniel and his friend Marc, a free-lance Belgian guitar maker.  They were taking the boat back to Belgium before one day returning it to Greece.  Daniel led us to believe that Eliane had a very senior job with the European Commission and strangely we weren’t at all surprised.  Well the conversation started to flow and we were invited aboard for an evening of virtuoso guitar playing from Marc, vintage Burgundy, Greek pistachios and handmade Belgian Cigars.  Life doesn’t get much better than sitting under the canopy of a Greek fishing boat on a warm Summer evening listening to classical Spanish guitar and blowing cigar smoke out over the French countryside.

Scenically the Marne a Saone canal is probably the high spot to date.  Much of it is lined with fine avenues of trees and woodland and the rolling farmland seems to go on for ever, with maize and sunflower fields and groups of contented cattle and every now and then a sleepy village.  Take the place we stopped at for a couple of nights on our first weekend on the Marne a Saone - a “halt nautique” in the middle of nowhere.  There was just enough room for us and the two other boats moored and for the princely sum of 8 euros per night we had a power supply and a neat little facilities block with a loo and shower and basins for washing out clothes.  It was quiet, very quiet.  There was an enormous maize field extending below the canal to one side and to the other the village of Orconte – a typical French one Boulanger town.  The place was neat and seemingly prosperous and had a lot of bored teenagers – promenading up and down the otherwise empty main road, playing table football in the small bar and, inevitably, meeping and farting their way up and down every road and footpath on scooters and mopeds of every description trying really hard to look cool.

I don’t want to complain but although this quiet rural stuff is very pleasant, frankly you can have too much of a good thing and after the first couple of days it does get a bit, well, boring and kind of claustrophobic.  No wonder the kids take to screaming up and down the place on scooters with the silencers taken out.  And what happened to all the bars and restaurants?  Maybe I’m idealising, but I thought every French village had a fine country restaurant and a bar open all hours and full of friendly peasants.  Every village bar we’ve been to has shut by nine o’clock and seems to be full of misogynist piss-artist losers wearing heavy metal band T-shirts and thumbing through pornography.  I guess all the normal people buy cheap booze at the supermarket and get pissed in front of the satellite TV just like at home.

We’ve had a couple of minor crises, in our first week on the canals we got an old barge mooring rope wrapped round our prop necessitating a two hour stop while I attacked it with a bread knife and in our third week the cable connecting the gear lever to the gearbox came undone, leaving us stuck in forward gear – this was quite exciting until I solved the problem as the only way to stop the boat was to turn the engine off and chuck a bucket over the stern to act as a sea anchor.  But these problems were solved and we are in reasonably good shape I hope to complete our journey to the Med.

Apart from Andre and Marie-Pierre, who we hope to meet up with in Antibes when they go on holiday there in September, many people have shown us help and kindness.  The lock keeper at our second lock on the industrial northern canals who gave us his Inland Waterways issued manual for dealing with foreign tourists on the canals which is packed with arcane but useful French phrases.  The South African couple we met last night at the public moorings in St Jean de Losne who are returning from the Med and gave us two pages of notes on navigating the Saone and the Rhone.  Just a couple of many.

Last time I wrote I said that I felt not like a traveller, but like someone preparing to be one.  Well I certainly feel like a traveller now, but with a boundary to cross, which is the boundary between the area we need to travel through to get to the places that we want to travel in.  At the moment the journey has a fast pace so that we can get to the country we want to travel in.  I think we may only recognise this boundary some days after we have crossed it.  Maybe we already have, or maybe the weather needs to get more Mediterranean.  Someone said to us yesterday that “the South of France starts about a hundred miles South of Lyon when it gets noticeably hotter”.  So maybe that’s the boundary.  We shall see.