We had barely seen another boat for miles (kilometres) and we had decided that our end of day mooring would be at Fontenoy le Chateau. Imagine our surprise to find the place pretty well packed. But there was a space just beyond the boat hire company finger moorings which looked possible. Will and Mike helped us to moor. They were, it turned out, an Englishman and an Australian (no, no joke follows – rather the contrary) in a little wooden yacht which Will had bought last year and which he had left in the ‘capable’ hands of the hire boat company while he returned to the UK for 6 weeks paying for his mooring of course. Meanwhile the hire boat company had ignored his boat (despite requests to keep an eye on it) and it had sunk!!
So having started to pump the boat out and got it afloat, the chaps had removed everything from the interior and put it all on the bank side in the sun to dry out, and were doing their best to complete the pumping of all the excess water and drying everything out before setting off on the rest of their journey to the Med! We sympathised and gave them drinks and nibbles, but as we still had no cooking gas on board we couldn’t offer much more and off they went to eat. Later we met a land-based partnership, Oscar and Marie-Laura who had late evening drinks with us until well after our bedtime. Oscar was the son of an English mother and a Dutch bargee father, so his English was superb.
A couple of days later, we arrived at Corre where, at last, we were able to replenish our gas bottles and much else at the local Intermarché, 1km from the mooring. We actually made three trips in all with Alex wobbling dangerously on his bike with 15kg of gas bottle on the back – twice!
The following day we stopped for lunch on a mooring which we knew was a mere 400 metres from an Aldi where we stocked up on all our favourite bits that we couldn’t get from the bigger supermarket then travelled on to a mooring at Conflanday.
We decided that an early start and finish (in the cool of the morning) was better for Alex, still in a rather feeble condition, so we set off at 8am and moored up near Soing at 12.30. During the rest of the day, the wind got up and at least one tree was blown down across the road to the village, but by the time we cycled past, it had been moved off the road. We could see several other trees which had suffered the same fate either that day or within the very recent past. The village was rather nice and had, of all things, a miniature Eiffel Tower on the camping/playground area: when we rode through at 3pm, they were in the midst of celebrating Bastille Day with games for the children and a barbeque in preparation. Much later, after dark, Louise (Alex was asleep) had a fine view of the fireworks from our moorings.
We ultimately arrived at Gray where we were hoping to take on fuel. Our first attempt to stop above the lock to enquire of VNF where we could get it, was on a quay reserved for commercial craft but the only possible space for our boat. And of course a fisherman who was unloading his car ready to start fishing there gave us such a mouthful of abuse. For once Alex got cross himself and said in French – “Look, you have all day everyday to fish here: we are only here for 5 minutes! What is your problem?” He just couldn’t manage to find the French for, “You nasty little man”!
VNF told us where to moor and where to get the fuel so we moved below the lock onto the town moorings. Depth is a problem in pretty well all moorings on the Petite Saône but we managed OK until our fuel was delivered by tanker the next morning: then we were able to move across to the long quay where we also got free water and electricity. Bliss! But still very shallow – having to hold ourselves off some 2 metres at the stern.
Louise went off to top up fresh veg supplies but on her way she spotted the Tourist Information Office and dropped by to get a town map – the usual. The lady in charge, Claudine, was a real boat enthusiast, loving barges in particular, and Louise promised to call by later with photos of Riccall. When she saw our pictures, she said she would like to take some photos herself for her monthly magazine and we arranged for her to drop by at 8.15 am the following morning (!) before we left and before her 9 am appointment, as later in the day she would be travelling north to visit a sick friend.
So that visit all went well, we said goodbye and off she went at 8.50 am. We started to prepare to leave: we even had our first ropes off, when a lady boater spoke to us, warning us that the moorings we were aiming for that night were closed for the village fête and in any case the noise would be appalling, even if we could get in. Change of plan – we will stay another day. We re-moored ourselves and a few minutes later Claudine re-appeared with her husband Christoph, and they both came aboard for coffee and more chat. When she learned that we were staying she invited us to their home for lunch – they weren’t leaving for the north until 3pm and would have to travel back through Gray anyway, so it was no trouble to drop us back. They were both so keen for us to go, so we accepted the invitation. A light salad for lunch was promised, which suits us fine. So off we went to their house in the countryside.
Having greeted their son Armand and Claudine’s mother, who sadly spoke no English at all, we all sat down to lunch – couscous, bread, tomatoes, hard boiled eggs, gherkins and radishes. Not perhaps what we might have offered but we thought, just perfect, our size of lunch. We should have known! Suddenly fried white sausages (veal) and apple slices appeared, with boiled rice and more bread. Having partaken of a token helping of that, out came the cheese and more bread. Then finally (you’ve guessed it) the dessert arrived! - a huge bowl of fresh fruit salad with cold semolina. At this point Alex said, “Non Merci” patting his already full tummy. (He doesn’t do fruit, and he certainly doesn’t do cold semolina!!) Finally coffee. How can anyone fail to become overweight with meals like that?
Claudine’s father had run a cheese manufacturing operation employing 15 people, at this very place for many years before the rise of the supermarkets made it no longer viable. They sent lorry loads of their cheese – Le Charmeur – to Paris twice a week. The old factory was crumbling away next to the house but Claudine still had great pride in what it had been. She gave us a cheese wrapper from the old business with the name of the company and the cheese. (We wondered how many wrappers she had left!) But Christoph, who gave us a tour of the quite extensive grounds, said that Claudine’s father had died only two years ago and the whole subject of what to do with the old creamery was still very much up in the air.
Some time after our return to Riccall we were delighted to see Will and Mike going past in their once-sunken sailing boat, having dried it all out and got it working again. Lots of waves and hellos and goodbyes as they went.
We left Gray the next day and still couldn’t moor where we had hoped, because although the fête had finished, today it was Brocante Day – car boot sale!!! and the mooring was still cordoned off. But we did find a very good spot not much further on – our size and depth, quiet and peaceful.
Much later that night a Danish sailing boat appeared and asked to moor on us. Of course – not a problem. Susanne and Per were heading for the Med then the Atlantic to explore the islands of Madeira and the Canaries and at 1.8m deep, they really struggled to find suitable moorings. Having done 24 locks and twice as many kilometres that day, they were very tired indeed and more than ready to moor up. They were hugely grateful and we managed a bit of chat after their meal before we all turned in.
When we got to St Jean de Losne the place was packed, but we had noticed a couple of boats moored up in the trees just north of the town, so we headed back to them and managed to nestle in to the shallow bank ourselves, with a boater’s help tying to one bollard and three trees, our new gang plank being just long enough to reach the shore.
Last year we had bought two big plastic torpedo-shaped fenders in case we needed them, at Pont à Bar, and had been disappointed when one of then had developed a leak after about a month. The plastic seemed to have a fault in it. Then a month ago the second one developed a leak in the same way. Neither of these fenders has ever actually been used, so we felt a bit cheesed off about it. As we can’t possibly return them to Pont à Bar which is hundreds of kms away, we went into St Jean de Losne which has two chandleries (one the expensive H2O, and one the more reasonable Blanquarts). Not unreasonably we went to Blanquarts and explained about the fenders and our problem.
The assistant was very nice and said they had had a number of the self-same fenders last year with the same fault, and she would exchange them for us and send them back, even though we hadn’t bought them from her. Really kind of her. Alex had also felt different types of fender called ‘glissoires’ would be better for Riccall anyway to replace our worn-out wooden ones, and she was quite happy to sell us 4 of those and take off the value of the faulty plastic fenders.
What she never actually asked was how much we had originally paid for the fenders at Pont à Bar! She essentially refunded us what Blanquarts charge - nearly twice the price of Pont à Bar, and charged us for the four plastic ‘glissoires’ which were on special offer!
So all in all we did very well on the deal, and we also managed to buy the next two canal books we need, both of which were in stock.
On the way back to Riccall we spotted ‘Cinclus’ moored up on the passenger boat quay. They can do this as they are indeed a passenger boat, licensed as such. We had met Sasja and Ekko twice last year and when we appeared by their boat they were delighted to see us and asked us aboard for drinks and a catch-up chat. They were having a week’s ‘holiday’ from paying guests and had family there instead: children swimming in the river, adults relaxing. Lovely people, lovely boat.
So here we are, sitting in a (so far) 18 hour deluge of rain, but we are now ready for the next stage in our journey south – onto the Basse Saône to Lyon.
Tales of few moorings, huge commercial traffic and locks, fast river etc etc. (Louise- Aarghhh)
Thursday 22 July 2010
Tuesday 20 July 2010
Thaon to Corre
When we had come in to moor at Charmes a guy from a large Dutch barge called WILLIAM helped us with our ropes. He had helped us at the end of last year in the Port de France in Toul as well. It seems he sort of takes over as the ‘mooring commandant’ wherever he moors, but very helpful with it. He said he was staying at Charmes for 6 months, and we commiserated with him over the QUADRUPLING of the mooring costs at Port de France, Toul (the main reason he moved on).
He warned us that ahead in Thaon there was a rat run of 4 commercials through 4 locks between a gravel source and a gravel distribution depot/port, 4 kilometres apart on the canal. He also warned us that the depth on the branch canal to Epinal a few kilometres beyond Thaon was very limited.
He was dead right in both respects – we met three of the commercials returning unladen and followed a laden one through two locks. But what he didn’t warn us about was that one of the lock bridges in Thaon had a variable water level giving a clear air draught of between 3.5 m and 3.7 m. With our roof on we are 3.6 m and as we arrived at this bridge our height marker on our bow showed we couldn’t get under without removing the roof!
Emergency stop! Back off! and lower the wheelhouse roof. This is not a problem, only a surprise, as our book tells us that that all the bridges on this canal have a clear height of 3.7m.
Alex couldn’t believe this particular one and, after we moored up, he walked back to it, with a measuring tape. When he arrived, his first measurement showed 3.7 m. What’s going on? But as he took subsequent readings over the next 15 minutes or so, the water level rose till the air draught was down to 3.5 m. Scary!
We later spent a very interesting time at our mooring, observing the water level rise and fall by as much as 20 cms as these monsters passed through the locks.
A couple of days later and the branch canal to Epinal was signed at 1.6m depth but we could see that the water level was at least 300mm below normal: therefore the depth was actually 1.3 m. At our draught of 1.4 m we would surely have struggled. We had the same advice from VNF at their office at the junction where we moored up, and from the harbourmaster when we cycled into Epinal to have a looksee.
As we cycled past the moored boats there we suddenly saw a name we recognised - ‘VLINDER’, and on close inspection there were Rita and Eloy under their snazzy new canopy on top of their cabin roof. We had not seen them since our winter stay in Ghent Centrum, so it was great to be asked aboard, given drinks and snacks and to catch up with all that had been going on for the last year and a half, and most importantly, exchange mooring information.
We eventually left to ride back to Riccall just as it started to pour with rain. It stopped about half way back and though we were thoroughly soaked by this time, the weather was so warm that we had dried out by the time we got back to the boat.
While we were moored outside the VNF office we saw several boats pass this way and that – one of which stopped to moor on the VNF work boat next to us: a 15ft canoe with a small outboard! Ganot, a German, was spending 4-6 weeks cruising the Canal des Vosges and hoped to end up back at his home moorings on the Lahn River, off the Rhine near Koblenz in that time. He had everything he needed in his small canoe: tent, primus stove, food, plastic chair to sit in while steering or on the bank, plus leeboards for stability: altogether a simple but efficient way to travel and so easy to moor! He also managed a far faster speed than we can do!
He came for a drink with us in the evening and we learned how, with such a small boat, he paid no French licence fee, but because of this, the VNF were not always keen to let him use the locks unless there was another boat going too (a waste of water for such a small boat they said). We were going the next day so agreed that he was welcome to accompany us in the locks. It made a peculiar sight – us at the front of the lock towering over this tiny canoe tucked in behind with Ganot holding onto the lock ladder to keep his vessel in place. Some of the locks here are in such poor shape that here and there, there is no cement left between the stones which make up the walls, and they look as though they could fall out altogether at any time. In two locks, some of the teetering stones had been removed altogether and put on the lock side! Equally some of the lock ladders (there are at least two in every lock) to which Ganot was clinging, were only held on by the last two bolts at the top!
We found a place to moor on the summit level at a short new wooden quay with good rings. This was opposite a house on the other side of the canal which had a swimming pool in the garden. We were forced to listen as all the teenagers and adults kept leaping into the pool to cool down while we sweltered in the hot sun – temperature 36C. However, the following day Alex had a treat as Madame emerged and wandered around topless (and almost bottomless) for most of the morning!
Alex decided that this would be a good place to do a spot of painting on the back deck. We have, for some time, realised that the dark green paint absorbed the heat of the sun and radiated it off again – often too hot to touch, just when we wanted to sit there for our supper. So we set about painting a large proportion of it cream. (Good excuse to stay another day or so – you never know your luck – Alex!)
Our next mooring was just through the first lock down from the summit level. As the bottom gates started to open we could see a laden peniche about to enter! He was more than a little surprised to see us, as VNF had told him there was nobody coming through. (They had obviously forgotten all about us, as we’d been stopped for so long!)
The péniche jiggled about a bit and eventually signalled us to come past him on the ‘wrong’ side, which we started to do, but half way past we went aground. So there we were, locked hard up against Madame and Monsieur’s péniche ALAIN, with all of us pushing and pulling to get us past and off the bottom while protecting both boats. We would have been in real trouble if we had met him in the narrows above the lock. Up there it was like a tunnel but without a roof, for about one and a half miles, very twisty and only one and a half barges wide. One of us (US) would have had to back off!
However, this mooring allowed us to put on the first top coat of paint on the back deck and at a poor quality small supermarket, euphemistically named Ecomarché, the opportunity to stock up.
The next few locks, from 3 down to 8 are manually operated by VNF staff, (mostly student labour drafted in during the summer). As we reached the last of these Louise popped into the bedroom for something and spotted water all over the floor. Having to get back up on board to man the ropes, she assumed at first glance that the air con unit we have just installed was leaking. As it happened, a mooring which we had been looking out for was available just through Lock 8 so we stopped to investigate. When Alex got down to the bedroom he realised very quickly that it was not the air con leaking, but that water had been directed clean through the open porthole from one of the fountains of water that you often get from the leaky sides of a lock when it has recently been emptied (or in this case as we were descending).
So another trap for small children – always remember to close all the portholes when travelling through leaky locks.
However, the plus side was that the mooring was so idyllic, peaceful and remote, that we decided to stay the rest of the day. And . . . within an hour two cyclists turned up at the adjacent picnic table, then a cruiser to join them, and then the whole VNF mowing team – 6 men and machines - turned up to cut the grass. Goodbye peace and tranquillity! (but happily not for too long).
We set off again descending the locks and as we were about to emerge from one, Alex noticed our height marker on the front of Riccall showed lack of clearance under the bridge. He stopped, we looked again and it looked OK, so we started slowly forward. But the wave of water which happens when the lock empties must have been reflected back into the lock and raised the level again and the roof just started to catch – back off, and off with it, and two nasty scratches in the paint. When will we learn? And today we ran out of gas! We have a spare bottle of course but it too was empty. How did that happen? Someone said that gas can evaporate when it is hot, but we can’t believe that’s what happened!
To make up for it we found one of the most rural and ‘away from it all’ moorings so far; pity a German sailing boat decided to moor up in front of us an hour after we stopped there! But you can’t have it all!
We have meandered on, stopping where the mooring look nice, and have at last reached Corre, though not before another unexpected roof removal! We have restocked with gas, wine beer, and food ready for the trip south down the Saône. We have also realised that we need to get a bit more of a move on – after all, we’ve recently had a text from Paul and Diane saying they have just met Ganot in his canoe – 300kms ahead of us!!
He warned us that ahead in Thaon there was a rat run of 4 commercials through 4 locks between a gravel source and a gravel distribution depot/port, 4 kilometres apart on the canal. He also warned us that the depth on the branch canal to Epinal a few kilometres beyond Thaon was very limited.
He was dead right in both respects – we met three of the commercials returning unladen and followed a laden one through two locks. But what he didn’t warn us about was that one of the lock bridges in Thaon had a variable water level giving a clear air draught of between 3.5 m and 3.7 m. With our roof on we are 3.6 m and as we arrived at this bridge our height marker on our bow showed we couldn’t get under without removing the roof!
Emergency stop! Back off! and lower the wheelhouse roof. This is not a problem, only a surprise, as our book tells us that that all the bridges on this canal have a clear height of 3.7m.
Alex couldn’t believe this particular one and, after we moored up, he walked back to it, with a measuring tape. When he arrived, his first measurement showed 3.7 m. What’s going on? But as he took subsequent readings over the next 15 minutes or so, the water level rose till the air draught was down to 3.5 m. Scary!
We later spent a very interesting time at our mooring, observing the water level rise and fall by as much as 20 cms as these monsters passed through the locks.
A couple of days later and the branch canal to Epinal was signed at 1.6m depth but we could see that the water level was at least 300mm below normal: therefore the depth was actually 1.3 m. At our draught of 1.4 m we would surely have struggled. We had the same advice from VNF at their office at the junction where we moored up, and from the harbourmaster when we cycled into Epinal to have a looksee.
As we cycled past the moored boats there we suddenly saw a name we recognised - ‘VLINDER’, and on close inspection there were Rita and Eloy under their snazzy new canopy on top of their cabin roof. We had not seen them since our winter stay in Ghent Centrum, so it was great to be asked aboard, given drinks and snacks and to catch up with all that had been going on for the last year and a half, and most importantly, exchange mooring information.
We eventually left to ride back to Riccall just as it started to pour with rain. It stopped about half way back and though we were thoroughly soaked by this time, the weather was so warm that we had dried out by the time we got back to the boat.
While we were moored outside the VNF office we saw several boats pass this way and that – one of which stopped to moor on the VNF work boat next to us: a 15ft canoe with a small outboard! Ganot, a German, was spending 4-6 weeks cruising the Canal des Vosges and hoped to end up back at his home moorings on the Lahn River, off the Rhine near Koblenz in that time. He had everything he needed in his small canoe: tent, primus stove, food, plastic chair to sit in while steering or on the bank, plus leeboards for stability: altogether a simple but efficient way to travel and so easy to moor! He also managed a far faster speed than we can do!
He came for a drink with us in the evening and we learned how, with such a small boat, he paid no French licence fee, but because of this, the VNF were not always keen to let him use the locks unless there was another boat going too (a waste of water for such a small boat they said). We were going the next day so agreed that he was welcome to accompany us in the locks. It made a peculiar sight – us at the front of the lock towering over this tiny canoe tucked in behind with Ganot holding onto the lock ladder to keep his vessel in place. Some of the locks here are in such poor shape that here and there, there is no cement left between the stones which make up the walls, and they look as though they could fall out altogether at any time. In two locks, some of the teetering stones had been removed altogether and put on the lock side! Equally some of the lock ladders (there are at least two in every lock) to which Ganot was clinging, were only held on by the last two bolts at the top!
We found a place to moor on the summit level at a short new wooden quay with good rings. This was opposite a house on the other side of the canal which had a swimming pool in the garden. We were forced to listen as all the teenagers and adults kept leaping into the pool to cool down while we sweltered in the hot sun – temperature 36C. However, the following day Alex had a treat as Madame emerged and wandered around topless (and almost bottomless) for most of the morning!
Alex decided that this would be a good place to do a spot of painting on the back deck. We have, for some time, realised that the dark green paint absorbed the heat of the sun and radiated it off again – often too hot to touch, just when we wanted to sit there for our supper. So we set about painting a large proportion of it cream. (Good excuse to stay another day or so – you never know your luck – Alex!)
Our next mooring was just through the first lock down from the summit level. As the bottom gates started to open we could see a laden peniche about to enter! He was more than a little surprised to see us, as VNF had told him there was nobody coming through. (They had obviously forgotten all about us, as we’d been stopped for so long!)
The péniche jiggled about a bit and eventually signalled us to come past him on the ‘wrong’ side, which we started to do, but half way past we went aground. So there we were, locked hard up against Madame and Monsieur’s péniche ALAIN, with all of us pushing and pulling to get us past and off the bottom while protecting both boats. We would have been in real trouble if we had met him in the narrows above the lock. Up there it was like a tunnel but without a roof, for about one and a half miles, very twisty and only one and a half barges wide. One of us (US) would have had to back off!
However, this mooring allowed us to put on the first top coat of paint on the back deck and at a poor quality small supermarket, euphemistically named Ecomarché, the opportunity to stock up.
The next few locks, from 3 down to 8 are manually operated by VNF staff, (mostly student labour drafted in during the summer). As we reached the last of these Louise popped into the bedroom for something and spotted water all over the floor. Having to get back up on board to man the ropes, she assumed at first glance that the air con unit we have just installed was leaking. As it happened, a mooring which we had been looking out for was available just through Lock 8 so we stopped to investigate. When Alex got down to the bedroom he realised very quickly that it was not the air con leaking, but that water had been directed clean through the open porthole from one of the fountains of water that you often get from the leaky sides of a lock when it has recently been emptied (or in this case as we were descending).
So another trap for small children – always remember to close all the portholes when travelling through leaky locks.
However, the plus side was that the mooring was so idyllic, peaceful and remote, that we decided to stay the rest of the day. And . . . within an hour two cyclists turned up at the adjacent picnic table, then a cruiser to join them, and then the whole VNF mowing team – 6 men and machines - turned up to cut the grass. Goodbye peace and tranquillity! (but happily not for too long).
We set off again descending the locks and as we were about to emerge from one, Alex noticed our height marker on the front of Riccall showed lack of clearance under the bridge. He stopped, we looked again and it looked OK, so we started slowly forward. But the wave of water which happens when the lock empties must have been reflected back into the lock and raised the level again and the roof just started to catch – back off, and off with it, and two nasty scratches in the paint. When will we learn? And today we ran out of gas! We have a spare bottle of course but it too was empty. How did that happen? Someone said that gas can evaporate when it is hot, but we can’t believe that’s what happened!
To make up for it we found one of the most rural and ‘away from it all’ moorings so far; pity a German sailing boat decided to moor up in front of us an hour after we stopped there! But you can’t have it all!
We have meandered on, stopping where the mooring look nice, and have at last reached Corre, though not before another unexpected roof removal! We have restocked with gas, wine beer, and food ready for the trip south down the Saône. We have also realised that we need to get a bit more of a move on – after all, we’ve recently had a text from Paul and Diane saying they have just met Ganot in his canoe – 300kms ahead of us!!
Thursday 1 July 2010
Wasps in the warps and ants ‘n deck
So at last we set off for this year’s cruising season: a farewell to all our neighbours at Port Mansuy and off into the unknown. Before we left, Alex discovered a wasps’ nest under the spare rope up forward and in the absence of anti-wasp powder, picked the whole thing up with a boathook and hurled it onto the bank and thereafter decimated it!
Two days into our cruise up the Moselle and Louise suddenly finds ants crawling up the doorframe in the en-suite bathroom! On inspection they are all over the place: in the bedroom, under the carpet, around the skirting boards, up the walls, under the floor. HELP!
We are moored at the junction of the Canal des Vosges and the Nancy Embranchment and we decide to cycle the 15 kms to Nancy via the closed embranchment canal to get anti-ant powder and also the next guide for the canals we are about to experience. (We forgot to order it over our long winter lay-up!)
So out with the trusty bikes and off we go. We soon find out why the embranchment canal has been closed for the last couple of years, but can’t understand why it’s going to take another year to re-open it! There has been a landslip and 100m of canal has been filled in by the adjoining hillside. Even BW could tackle that and get the canal going in a couple of months! In Nancy we buy copious amounts of ‘fourmis’ killer powder and ‘honey pot’ killer traps, together with the map (not the favoured series, but beggars can’t be choosers), have lunch in Stanislas Square and finally wend our way back to the boat.
Then we tackle the ants: traps, powder, stamp, crush, kill for a couple of hours.
But the question remains: how did they get in? Alex keeps puzzling over this for some boringly long time. There were a few on the back deck but there is no way down from there except by the stairs, and there were none there. Then suddenly the possible solution comes to him. The previous night we had moored with some difficulty to a VNF ‘Press your zapper here’ sign, a tree at height to avoid the towpath and a stake hammered into the unyielding ground. We reckoned there would be little or no traffic till late morning as we had passed the point at which all nearby barges disgorged their scrap steel cargoes, and the locks were now back down to Freycinet size (39m x 5.10m). Of course as you would expect, a commercial Freycinet passed us going slowly (bless him) at 7.20am, just 20 minutes after the locks re-opened for the new day, and dragged the stake out. We didn’t see another boat of any sort until well into the afternoon1
This mooring was hard up against a lot of grass and vegetation nearly as high as the decks, and Alex realised that there was one route down to the underfloor that he hadn’t at first thought of. At the rear end of the main part of the boat, under the bedroom floor, is a bilge pump for the unimaginable prospect of inundation of water in the central part of Riccall. This pump is a centrifugal type and has no non-return valve in the outlet pipe, which exits high up near the stern. Alex’s conclusion is that the ants found this interesting hole in the side of the boat and crawled all the way down it, out past the pump impellor into the underfloor of the bedroom and thence up to everywhere else!
As this is a boat and everything is supposed to be waterproof (and therefore, ant-proof) this is the only explanation we can arrive at, and when Alex looked in the outlet hole, there was an ANT in it!! It’s not nice being invaded though, and while the various anti-ant stuffs do their stuff we will sleep in the guest bedroom up forward.
On the plus side, the bike ride was fun: the embranchment canal is lovely and Nancy, particularly Stanislas Square, is brilliant.
We set off, reluctantly, from our mooring and proceeded on our way. The first lock was fine but somewhere at the next lock we failed to see the zapper post which meant that the lock couldn’t operate. Louise disembarked and walked back down the towpath pressing the button every 10 metres or so still unable to visually locate the sign post. Suddenly the green light on the lock was illuminated and the lock began to operate. Alex got on the walkie-talkie and let Louse know she had (somehow) set it off! We still have no idea where the receiving post was but at last we are on our way.
Half an hour later it is time for Louise’s morning cup of coffee for which everything stops, and by chance a mooring is in sight, so we moor up. It happens to be such an idyllic spot that we decide to stay on for that night as well, with an interesting bike ride after lunch to boot. There are a few weekend cottages around but the loudest noise is from the local birdsong: the sun shines and we enjoy supper on the back deck in the cooling setting rays.
Charmes is our next stop and charming it ain’t! But to stock up at the local supermarket we pay our €7 for mooring and electricity and moor adjacent to the hoards of campervans which have congregated at this spot – obviously a popular road rest.
The following day, we have our hopes set on a mooring at Nomexy/Chatel, which according to our DBA information, has a guided tour of a local castle, much of which is below ground! We arrive at the first appointed time of 3 pm to be met by an elderly couple who are in the process of opening up for business.
The lady speaks quite good English, which is encouraging, but suddenly we discover we have both left our money on the boat! Sacré bleu! But Madame says, ‘No problem – pay after the tour’. So Alex, Louise and a decrepit Frenchman start being shown the sights by Madame. We begin in the museum artefacts display rooms and everything is explained in English (short version) and French (minute detail) for about 45 minutes. How long is this tour? Then we go outside and start looking at some of the actual remains: diving into rooms here, down precipitous stairs there, in and out of everywhere. It is huge site and it has been excavated by many thousands of international archaeologists amidst and amongst the later private dwellings. Our fellow tourist is only about 65 but is less steady on his feet than our guide who turns out to be 80! Yes, actually 80 years old. So they help each other up and down the steep steps with Louise and Alex chipping in where appropriate.
At 5.30 we are joined by 3 other tourists who had missed the start of the tour, but eventually sometime after 6 it was all over.
Our guide had been on her feet, explaining everything in French and English for over 3 hours, and WE were exhausted!!! Alex congratulated her on a command performance, left a huge (for him) tip and even bought a postcard, which Louise had particularly liked.
The castle dated back to the 11th century and had been added to over the centuries. It has been a very important point in the history of the region as it was at the crossroads of early Roman and later French, Prussian, Dutch and German major arteries. It was an important stronghold in the region and our guide had been involved in its excavation almost from the beginning in the 1970s.
She LIVED that castle - both for it, in it and around it. It was her life. She was even hoping for the local hospital to be demolished so she could unearth more of the remains underneath it – at 80! She herself had removed tons of rubbish that had been used to fill in the fabric of the castle interior at the behest of Louis 15th, who had felt it was a stronghold against his power, so he annihilated it. She pointed to a rather scruffy row of garage type buildings, rejoicing that they were about to be demolished and she would be excavating further parts of the castle as soon as they had disappeared!
Her whole family were involved: she, her husband, her children and her grandchildren were all a part of it. Incredible! What a bizarre scene!
The next day, we visited the local 15th Century church in the same village. Alex had seen a man enter, so we knew the church was open. As we stood at the back however, we could see and hear a couple of fellows near the altar chatting away 19 to the dozen. Alex decided to go up to have a closer look at the altar area, but as he approached the two men, he noticed a woman at one of the side chapels in floods of tears. He beat a hasty retreat and we sat quietly at the back, not sure quite what to do. A few minutes later one of the of the men escorted the woman (still sobbing) from the premises and the other man approached us and introduced himself. He was clearly the Father or ‘curate’, and he gave us a brief history of the church, and then we all came out and he locked the door behind us! But why all the tears? What had happened? We felt we had stumbled into some significant personal tragedy and hoped we hadn’t made things worse by our presence. But the young woman’s misfortune was our good luck – a chance to look inside what would normally have been a locked church!
Two days into our cruise up the Moselle and Louise suddenly finds ants crawling up the doorframe in the en-suite bathroom! On inspection they are all over the place: in the bedroom, under the carpet, around the skirting boards, up the walls, under the floor. HELP!
We are moored at the junction of the Canal des Vosges and the Nancy Embranchment and we decide to cycle the 15 kms to Nancy via the closed embranchment canal to get anti-ant powder and also the next guide for the canals we are about to experience. (We forgot to order it over our long winter lay-up!)
So out with the trusty bikes and off we go. We soon find out why the embranchment canal has been closed for the last couple of years, but can’t understand why it’s going to take another year to re-open it! There has been a landslip and 100m of canal has been filled in by the adjoining hillside. Even BW could tackle that and get the canal going in a couple of months! In Nancy we buy copious amounts of ‘fourmis’ killer powder and ‘honey pot’ killer traps, together with the map (not the favoured series, but beggars can’t be choosers), have lunch in Stanislas Square and finally wend our way back to the boat.
Then we tackle the ants: traps, powder, stamp, crush, kill for a couple of hours.
But the question remains: how did they get in? Alex keeps puzzling over this for some boringly long time. There were a few on the back deck but there is no way down from there except by the stairs, and there were none there. Then suddenly the possible solution comes to him. The previous night we had moored with some difficulty to a VNF ‘Press your zapper here’ sign, a tree at height to avoid the towpath and a stake hammered into the unyielding ground. We reckoned there would be little or no traffic till late morning as we had passed the point at which all nearby barges disgorged their scrap steel cargoes, and the locks were now back down to Freycinet size (39m x 5.10m). Of course as you would expect, a commercial Freycinet passed us going slowly (bless him) at 7.20am, just 20 minutes after the locks re-opened for the new day, and dragged the stake out. We didn’t see another boat of any sort until well into the afternoon1
This mooring was hard up against a lot of grass and vegetation nearly as high as the decks, and Alex realised that there was one route down to the underfloor that he hadn’t at first thought of. At the rear end of the main part of the boat, under the bedroom floor, is a bilge pump for the unimaginable prospect of inundation of water in the central part of Riccall. This pump is a centrifugal type and has no non-return valve in the outlet pipe, which exits high up near the stern. Alex’s conclusion is that the ants found this interesting hole in the side of the boat and crawled all the way down it, out past the pump impellor into the underfloor of the bedroom and thence up to everywhere else!
As this is a boat and everything is supposed to be waterproof (and therefore, ant-proof) this is the only explanation we can arrive at, and when Alex looked in the outlet hole, there was an ANT in it!! It’s not nice being invaded though, and while the various anti-ant stuffs do their stuff we will sleep in the guest bedroom up forward.
On the plus side, the bike ride was fun: the embranchment canal is lovely and Nancy, particularly Stanislas Square, is brilliant.
We set off, reluctantly, from our mooring and proceeded on our way. The first lock was fine but somewhere at the next lock we failed to see the zapper post which meant that the lock couldn’t operate. Louise disembarked and walked back down the towpath pressing the button every 10 metres or so still unable to visually locate the sign post. Suddenly the green light on the lock was illuminated and the lock began to operate. Alex got on the walkie-talkie and let Louse know she had (somehow) set it off! We still have no idea where the receiving post was but at last we are on our way.
Half an hour later it is time for Louise’s morning cup of coffee for which everything stops, and by chance a mooring is in sight, so we moor up. It happens to be such an idyllic spot that we decide to stay on for that night as well, with an interesting bike ride after lunch to boot. There are a few weekend cottages around but the loudest noise is from the local birdsong: the sun shines and we enjoy supper on the back deck in the cooling setting rays.
Charmes is our next stop and charming it ain’t! But to stock up at the local supermarket we pay our €7 for mooring and electricity and moor adjacent to the hoards of campervans which have congregated at this spot – obviously a popular road rest.
The following day, we have our hopes set on a mooring at Nomexy/Chatel, which according to our DBA information, has a guided tour of a local castle, much of which is below ground! We arrive at the first appointed time of 3 pm to be met by an elderly couple who are in the process of opening up for business.
The lady speaks quite good English, which is encouraging, but suddenly we discover we have both left our money on the boat! Sacré bleu! But Madame says, ‘No problem – pay after the tour’. So Alex, Louise and a decrepit Frenchman start being shown the sights by Madame. We begin in the museum artefacts display rooms and everything is explained in English (short version) and French (minute detail) for about 45 minutes. How long is this tour? Then we go outside and start looking at some of the actual remains: diving into rooms here, down precipitous stairs there, in and out of everywhere. It is huge site and it has been excavated by many thousands of international archaeologists amidst and amongst the later private dwellings. Our fellow tourist is only about 65 but is less steady on his feet than our guide who turns out to be 80! Yes, actually 80 years old. So they help each other up and down the steep steps with Louise and Alex chipping in where appropriate.
At 5.30 we are joined by 3 other tourists who had missed the start of the tour, but eventually sometime after 6 it was all over.
Our guide had been on her feet, explaining everything in French and English for over 3 hours, and WE were exhausted!!! Alex congratulated her on a command performance, left a huge (for him) tip and even bought a postcard, which Louise had particularly liked.
The castle dated back to the 11th century and had been added to over the centuries. It has been a very important point in the history of the region as it was at the crossroads of early Roman and later French, Prussian, Dutch and German major arteries. It was an important stronghold in the region and our guide had been involved in its excavation almost from the beginning in the 1970s.
She LIVED that castle - both for it, in it and around it. It was her life. She was even hoping for the local hospital to be demolished so she could unearth more of the remains underneath it – at 80! She herself had removed tons of rubbish that had been used to fill in the fabric of the castle interior at the behest of Louis 15th, who had felt it was a stronghold against his power, so he annihilated it. She pointed to a rather scruffy row of garage type buildings, rejoicing that they were about to be demolished and she would be excavating further parts of the castle as soon as they had disappeared!
Her whole family were involved: she, her husband, her children and her grandchildren were all a part of it. Incredible! What a bizarre scene!
The next day, we visited the local 15th Century church in the same village. Alex had seen a man enter, so we knew the church was open. As we stood at the back however, we could see and hear a couple of fellows near the altar chatting away 19 to the dozen. Alex decided to go up to have a closer look at the altar area, but as he approached the two men, he noticed a woman at one of the side chapels in floods of tears. He beat a hasty retreat and we sat quietly at the back, not sure quite what to do. A few minutes later one of the of the men escorted the woman (still sobbing) from the premises and the other man approached us and introduced himself. He was clearly the Father or ‘curate’, and he gave us a brief history of the church, and then we all came out and he locked the door behind us! But why all the tears? What had happened? We felt we had stumbled into some significant personal tragedy and hoped we hadn’t made things worse by our presence. But the young woman’s misfortune was our good luck – a chance to look inside what would normally have been a locked church!
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