Tournai yacht club and setting off for Lille

We have been back to the UK and had all the dental work done or at least begun.  The rest can wait till winter.

The Clio is sorted at last and now in Jamie’s hands in reasonable working order (another £500 spent but at least we managed to get our £320 back from the useless John).

On our return we learnt that our friends Bob and Sue on JUNO were not a million miles away at Dinant on their way south to the Midi.  So we jumped in the car and drove down to have a lovely lunch with them before they got too far south.

Since then we have been back on Riccall in our lovely mooring, finishing off the last bits of painting which we failed to complete in the last session, and doing some local sightseeing: to the small aerodrome 2kms away from which microlights and gliders keep appearing over our mooring, and also to the old or former canal.

In fact, we could hardly bear to leave the Grand Large at Péronne.  Every day we have had flotillas of sailing boats, sail boards and canoes with children and teenagers being taught how it’s all done: everything from little 6 year olds learning how to paddle, to young people deliberately capsizing their craft so as to learn how to right them again – a great spectacle and such fun to watch.

Then opposite us was an amazing boatyard (reminiscent of our own at Methley Bridge) which was capable of lifting small boats out of the water using straps, and larger craft on a sideways slip, or even in some cases, forwards on trolleys on rails.  There seemed to be boats going in or out almost every day with the lovely Marjorie, the very capable owner and hands-on operator, getting stuck in driving the tractor, checking straps or supports and yelling instructions all the while!  Alex says “What a woman!”

We were surprised one day when we got back to the boat from a short drive to see a cluster of cruisers gathering in the middle of ‘our’ lake round a péniche called Troubadour.  This was obviously an annual event which they carried out on 15^th August - Assumption Day.  All the boats gathered for an all-day party on Troubadour with eating, drinking, music and dancing: that is, until she dragged her anchor in the wind and they all un-moored and milled about while Troubadour re-anchored herself back in the middle of the lake.  The cruisers then all re-grouped and carried on with the party.

So we had electricity, water, nice neighbours and shops in both France and Belgium not far away (and we still had the car) and interesting things happening almost every day, but we were still in Belgium, and here I must make some observations about the Belgians. 

When we had cousins Mary and Martin to stay with us earlier this year as we travelled north from France into Belgium, we were a bit nonplussed at how vehement Mary was about the Belgian people – not a good word to say about them.  But now we see, to an extent, what she was getting at.  Individuals when you get to know them are perfectly pleasant, if a little reserved, (and we must pay tribute to our Capitaine, Yvon who has been marvellous) but on the roads they never give you any thanks or even an acknowledgement when you have stopped or given way to them: far worse than the French in this respect.  We have had many walking past our moorings, looking at us with evident interest but never a wave or a ‘bonjour’ or even a smile.

In fact after a bit, you think ‘sod ‘em’ and stop doing it yourself, then when you get into France, as we often did to get the internet through our SFR dongle, you are surprised because everybody smiles and says ‘Bonjour’ when you see or pass them.  And in the usual French fashion, when someone comes into the Post Office or shop for example, they say, ‘Messieurdames’ addressing everyone in the queue!  It’s just great and only 200 yards across the border from Belgium!

Yvon never did tell us how the ‘give way to the right’ rule works, but we think we have at last worked it out!  Yellow diamond signs every half kilometre or so mean that you have right of way until you get the sign with a diagonal line through it. Then  if you are expected to give way, there will be a small crossroad sign such as we used to have in the UK before WW2! i.e. an x not a +.  But this does not tell you if this is a genuine crossroads or a road entering from the left or the right.  Even if you are on the main road when you see this crossroad sign, you are expected to give way to any traffic emerging from the right!!  There are even instances where there are signs warning of a DANGEROUS CROSSROAD AHEAD, where visibility is limited, and rather than just making the side road give way they warn of the danger.  Balmy!!!

However, we have at last left the Grand Large on our trip to Lille where we’ll meet Louise’s son Robert who arrives for a 3 day weekend shortly.

We decided it would be fun to go by the recently re-opened (2010) Canal de l’Espièrres and Canal de Roubaix which we have been encouraged by our Barge Association to use, as a lot of money and effort has been spent in re-opening it.  The canal crosses the border between Belgium and France so two authorities are involved in running it, and you need to contact both to make arrangements for moving through the locks.

We tried to ring the French branch before we left the Grand Large but the office was closed for the holiday, we assumed, so we decided to wing it and go that way anyway – just a day’s cruise to get there and find out the situation.  As we left the Grand Large through the lock the lockkeeper asked us our destination, as they all do, and when we said Lille via the Canal de l’Espièrres he appeared to insist that the other, southern route was the one to do.  We tried to explain our intentions but our French not being good enough for him, he gave up on us and vanished into his eyrie.  Our computer program had been quite happy about our intention to do the northern route and it would have come up with a CAUTION if there had been any problem, so when we got to Tournai we stopped for lunch and free wifi and downloaded the latest stoppages list just to be on the safe side.  No problem listed, so we decided to carry on.

The entrance to the Canal de L’Espièrres is unmarked and achieved through a rather uninviting 5m wide flood lock (now obsolete).  We made the usual jokes about The African Queen etc, as you do, and with some trepidation we made our way towards the first lock, some 1.5 kms up the canal.  It was obvious that there was no official mooring so we hurled a grappling hook at the bank and managed to get lines round a couple of trees.  Then we rang the Belgian Waterways who agreed to pass us through the first lock at 8am the next morning.   A bit early for us, but there you go.

By 9.15am the next morning, after several phone calls and contact on the VHF radio, a lockkeeper arrived to pen us through the first lock.

In the meantime, however, we had at last got through to the French section of the canal authority and had learnt that though the canal is normally open, it was however closed for at least the weekend due to lack of water!!  The situation would be reviewed after the weekend to see if the levels had risen at all. 

So we considered the scene for a short time – should we go through two locks and 3 lift bridges to the French border, then sit there for who knows how long in the hope that the water level can be sorted out.  No thanks! 

Well, decision made, but we then had to work out how to turn round in a canal too narrow for the manoeuvre, and as 1.5kms is a very long way to try to get Riccall to go backwards (!) we went into the lock, explained our problem to the waiting lockkeeper, checked the width and depth of the pound above the lock, and then rose in the lock.  We then proceeded to do a very tight about-turn in the pound above.  The eclusier quite understood and said we were the 5^th vessel that month to abandon their attempt and leave the canal.  Most, being smaller and more shallow-drafted than us, had gone a little further than us before admitting defeat.

So Goodbye l’Espièrres: we tried, we failed.