As we arrived in Pontoise, passing under the rail bridge and heading for what looked like good quay moorings, we were surprised to find 3 or 4 pigeons alighting on the foredeck. Louise was quick to pop out of the wheelhouse and shoo them away before they crapped over our otherwise immaculate decks!
We thought little more about it until later when we noticed that as the commercial barges passed us the pigeons flocked to each one. They rode upon each barge for a kilometre or so and just before they reached the nearby lock the pigeons flew back to their roosts under the bridge! It appeared to be a game; they took great delight in cadging a free ride on the barges as they headed downstream.
We speculated about this as we observed it time after time and eventually decided that the more mundane explanation was that perhaps some of the barges carried grain and the pigeons were looking for spilled grain lying on the decks. (That would also explain why bargees, or more often their wives, spend hours hosing down what appear to be perfectly clean decks.) One of the good things about retirement is that you can spend hours on such speculations! But it was a most amusing sight and our best photo shows only a hint of the inundation suffered by some of the barges.
We left Pontoise having posted our most recent blog in one of the two internet cafés in town: one hot, cramped and slow, the other spacious, cool and lightning-quick, and worth twice the price for that comfort and eventually we found our way onto the historic Seine at Conflans St Honorine.
It’s big, very big, but we got through the first lock OK after a 15 min wait, while two barges came upstream, then made our way down, stopping for lunch at a Halte Fluvial at Poissy, which was a great find, as they are few and far between on a river like the Seine.
We arrived at the moorings at Meulan early on a lovely sunny afternoon, where we met a couple from Canada who had sailed their 12m yacht all the way from Northern Canada, down the Great Lakes, across the Atlantic to the Azores, and then into the canal system of France, all with a couple of smelly dogs and a cat on board! And they had been in France since 2007! The moorings themselves were lovely, alongside a pretty little park, but tended to attract the down-and-outs and mentally unstable of the town, one of whom, one evening, hung on our handrail pointing vigorously at his face covered in blood. Alex thrust a large handful of tissues at him, at which he left – thank goodness. A genuine nosebleed or the result of fisticuffs between ne’er-do-wells?
The next day the whole of the path alongside the river and next to us was awash with amateur artists painting the Vieux Pont just ahead of us. We explained we would be gone and out of their way in an hour, but they said no, they wanted our boat in the picture which was very gratifying.!
Later we experienced one of the odd features of the canalised rivers in this area, where the prioritisation of the side on which opposing barges pass is reversed. (The normal rule of the river is to drive on the right.)
We had noticed this a few times previously on the l’Oise, but had been fortunate enough never to have to put it to the test as there had been no opposing traffic, and on this occasion, as far as we could tell, it was normal passing sides. BUT the barge coming towards us was definitely on our side!
We made a decisive move to our right (further over into the normal and correct side) and he seemed to move to his RIGHT also, but then a few seconds later Alex spotted that a rusty old ‘blue flag’ had been deployed by him and a swift change of course to the LEFT side was called for by us.
We still haven’t sussed out why all this changing of passing side is necessary on rivers as wide and deep as the Seine (never mind why all the islands on both the l’Oise and the Seine have to be passed on the ‘wrong’ side) but no doubt someday somebody will be able to explain it – or not!
But we don’t suppose the barge which we met later will be able to! We saw him some distance off on one of the sections where we were supposed to be on the ‘wrong’ side and we were. But it seemed the opposing barge was on ‘our’ side too. What to do? We watched for a telltale change of direction from him – it didn’t happen – so we then decided to make an obvious move to the right side to pass conventionally. A second after we had done this, he at last changed his course – to the designated ‘wrong’ side – i.e. towards us!
Alex made a decisive move even further to the right and at last the oncoming juggernaut changed course to his right. Phew! One kilometre behind us was a laden barge. He showed us what we should have done – stuck to our guns on the ‘wrong’ side.
As all this was happening, our program Noodersoft chose that moment to have a glitch, whereby an error message kept popping up and repeating itself with a plungk! sound each time as fast as we could cancel it. So thus, with all the distractions audible and visual, we also missed going down the correct side of a 4km long island to locate our next mooring place.
Never mind, we knew there was a way through the middle of the island albeit with a low bridge. We turned in and could see very quickly that the bridge was too low. Of course the barge which had been behind us was now much nearer and the gentle current in the river was not going to let us hang about. In fact, it was pushing us right towards the shallows. There was no choice – we had to engage full ahead and pull out in front of the laden barge, powering over a shallow sand bank as we did so. (We only listed about 20o but all the drawers came open in the bedroom!)
Then we weren’t able to let the barge pass us, because there was a laden and unladen barge breasted up coming towards us upstream, and by the time they were past we were almost at the downstream end of the island where we had to make a right turn in our second attempt to reach our next mooring.
Again, right in front of the laden barge we had to make the turn. Ah well, we hoped he understood, having seen us go aground, but he probably thought, ‘Mad English amateurs’.
We got to the moorings at Limay and found a lovely quiet spot, on a good wall with bollards, just up from a Port de Plaisance. The only slight downside was a plague of harmless black flies. Even with the wheelhouse doors closed they somehow got in. Alex has been busy with the swatter and there are piles of dead flies all over the place!! In fact Alex has done more swatting these last couple of days than he ever did for his exams!! (Swatting not swotting you fool!)
We have found an Aldi and an Intermarche and a rather splendid church, and with our unerring knack of being in the right place at the right (sometimes wrong) time we were treated to an absolutely fabulous firework display to finish off some sort of local celebration in the town. It went on from 11.00 to 11.30 in a continuous riot of colour and we had a perfect view from where we were moored.
We moved up to a rather lightweight pontoon to take on water a day or so later and look! – an unlocked wi-fi! a signal from the tennis club on the other side of the river. Quick, get those emails read and sent, book those flights/train tickets, download The Archers podcasts, deal with the bank overdraft etc. etc. It’s all very well using internet cafés but the operating systems are all in French and the key positions on the keyboard are in different places and sometimes the memory stick works and sometimes it doesn’t!
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