On the Somme

So now we were truly on the Somme and were feeling quite optimistic about the trip though mooring may not be as easy as elsewhere, or so we thought at first.  When we reached Cappy the next day, Danni and Elspeth (from Switzerland) helped us moor up, which was no easy task given the shallowness of the water, but we were able to move along to the pontoon mooring later and they came for drinks and a really good chat.  They liked RICCALL’s fit-out and we had a look at their boat L’ARC EN CIEL. It’s brand new this season, a 13m x 4m state of the art cruiser: and it’s quite amazing what can be fitted into a relatively small footprint.

Now we were into the thick of the First World War arena of the Somme.  We all tend to think of it as mud and trench foot, of ruined landscapes pockmarked with craters and littered with ruined villages.  And of course, this is just what it was like 90 years ago, but now it is hard to comprehend bearing in mind the total transformation.  The towns and villages have been rebuilt, often to the exact likeness of what had been before, the trees have all re-grown or more likely been re-planted, the trenches have been obliterated by farming and there is hardly a trace of it all, apart from the relentless progression of cemeteries across the landscape, the monuments to the dead in every town and village, and war museums everywhere.  But the memory is being kept alive of an extraordinary waste of life in every corner of this area.

Among many memorials in the area, in Chipilly there is the famous sculpture of a soldier comforting his dying horse – for Alex the most moving memorial we saw.

We cruised down to Long with its wonderful chateau and hydroelectric generation plant and had a bit of trouble mooring up due to the current flowing towards the weir right opposite the mooring, taking RICCALL with it, but with the help of a boater also on the mooring we were able to bring the back end in – eventually!

This village owed its wealth to peat cutting and was one of the first in France to have hydroelectric power.  The power was limited, however, and each house was only allowed one light ‘on’ at a time and only at certain times of the day – but progress nevertheless.

We were due to catch up with our good friends Peter and Nicci on AURIGNY at Pont Remy.  Alex knew there would be quite a strong flow and had wondered how best to cope with it, but in the event we were there, approaching AURIGNY before we realised it!  The mooring turned out to be on the right hand side, whereas for some reason, Alex had imagined it on the left so hasty decisions had to be made.  We couldn’t turn round before reaching AURIGNY because there was a small historic barque moored directly opposite (we wouldn’t have been thanked for smashing it up) so taking a good chunk of tree with the back end we tried to turn opposite AURIGNY – not quite enough width – abort – ‘Sorry’ about the scratch in AURIGNY’s paintwork and we were carried down 1km in the strong flow to the lock.  The gates of the lock were closed of course, so we had to come to a stop on the rail which protects the weir!  We rang the lock keeper who arrived within 15 minutes and quickly understood the problem.  A quick suss of the area below the lock showed that with a bit of care, and using the flow re-entering the cut from the weir, we could turn there in order to retrace our steps.  The lock keeper let us through the lock to carry out a textbook about-turn (making up for the fiasco just minutes earlier) and back we went up the lock to moor in a controlled fashion upstream of AURIGNY.  Phew!  Alex calculated the flow at about 4kms per hour - not easy for mooring while going downstream! And impossible for RICCALL with her dramatic paddle effect to the left in reverse.

Peter and Nicci have had their car with them all this season, so with their encouragement we borrowed it and moved our own car from our Tournai Yacht Club mooring to Seneffe, our winter mooring (a rather longer trip than we had realised). We also drove down with them to St Valery on the Baie de Somme where the Somme enters the Atlantic.  This is a wonderful area of mud flats and shallows, with nature reserves and bird watching hides everywhere.  There is also a narrow gauge steam train which runs round the bay to Le Crotoy where we had lunch in a restaurant – the ubiquitous ‘moules frites’ before the return trip to St Valery and thence back to the boats by car.  The weather unfortunately was dreadful – cold and very wet, but the company more than made up for it.

We decided not to take RICCALL any further than Pont Remy, some 25kms shy of St Valery on the coast, as the current on the Somme was surprisingly strong and this would mean our upstream journey would be slow and somewhat tedious, particularly as the last 15kms of the canal is a straight concrete trough, the Canal Maritime, built in 1835 to improve what had been a difficult part of the Somme to negotiate.  Instead we cycled the 10k to Abbeville beside the river all the way.  We had visited Abbeville on our way south by car some 20 years ago and had spotted a British barge moored up.  We were very impressed by the whole idea of this way of life and I’m sure it was one of the things which encouraged us to make our fledgling dream a reality.  So, once again in Abbeville (not in itself a very charming place!) we tried to find the spot where that barge had been moored: and eventually we think we did find the exact place!

Amiens on our return upstream journey, was wet and windy so after a quick trip to Lidl and an express tour of the cathedral – the largest in France and big enough to hold two of Paris’s Notre Dames! – we sheltered back on RICCALL promising to re-do Amiens if and when the weather improved.

Corbie was all that we could hope for mooring-wise and the ‘Simply’ supermarket provided all we needed (including fresh milk for Alex).  We had been given an invaluable tip by Roz and Graham of OPABRADOR that the end bourne on the pontoon at Corbie gave out over 10 hours of leccy (and water) for your €2, instead of only 4 hours, so we immediately bagged it when we arrived!  They also suggested having a good supply of €2 coins for the Somme, as all the bournes will only take €2 coins, so it became a task for everyone who went shopping to try to get €2 coins in their change!  Not as easy as it sounds.

Our friends Mike and Jean arrived for a few days while we were there and we had a great time catching up with news of their recent house move and family stuff, and also an enlightening time visiting the Albert War Museum, which is housed in a 250m long underground tunnel and which was excellent, another narrow gauge railway - the Petit Train d’Haut Somme - which had been built to provide provisioning for the Allies at the front in 1916.  The 1916 front line runs very close here and the little railway line was used after the war until the 1960s to transport sugar beet from the depot on the plateau down to the canal.  We drove into Amiens (a bad move really – the train would have been better) and while Alex and Mike climbed the tower of the cathedral, Louise and Jean enjoyed a little time out with a glass or two of wine in the bistro next door.  It was a great couple of days and we were lucky with the weather which was largely fine and dry if cooling off for autumn.

The day after Mike and Jean left however was hot and sunny, so we felt the pull of Amiens again.  We caught the train this time and visited the two things we had so hoped to visit and which had escaped us the day before – firstly the area of Amiens called St Leu, sometimes called the Venice of the North - which is the old port district with its unusual buildings and many water courses running through it.  The present day canal bypasses this area so you don’t see it when passing through Amiens, so that was a worthwhile diversion. 

Secondly to the eastern side of Amiens is the area known as Les Hortillonnages.  The ancient marshland had been worked for peat many centuries ago, and these little allotment plots were gradually reclaimed from the marshes, banked up and used as market gardens.  The area covers 300 hectares and there are 65 kms of small canals criss-crossing it.  Nowadays few of the gardens are used for commercial production of fruit and vegetables as in the past, but it is possible to venture in amongst them by traditional boat.  We just happened to arrive at the booking office with 15 minutes to go before the small flotilla of boats was due to set off.  Success!  It was a great trip, even better for having cloudless skies and warm sunshine to enjoy the gardens and wildlife.

We cruised on to Chipilly where we breasted up on AURIGNY and had another great evening of dinner, drinks and jaw! 

And then we went our separate ways, for some months at least, while AURIGNY motored on in the search for winter moorings, and we ambled along looking at things of interest, one of which was an excursion by bike to the small town of Bray which does still have a canal branch leading into the town from the Somme, but which looked a bit uninviting when we passed by boat.  We eventually discovered the so-called Halte Fluvial  - a 20 metre wooden quay with a few small cleats, but to get to it, we would have had to negotiate 3 kms through a narrow canal and a wide open lake area.  The town once must have been vibrant with commercial boats coming and going: a Hotel du Port and a café du port at the terminus had catered for the batelliers, but now all was closed down with only a small Carrefour supermarket and a bar left as far as we could see!

So now we have left the beautiful and tranquil Somme for the Canal du Nord.  We had thought it would be good to visit Peronne on the way, but the moorings proved to be difficult.  On one side of the basin the bollards were far too far apart to moor safely and on the other side it appeared to be impossible to leave the mooring through a locked gate.  The Port de Plaisance was too expensive for a boat of our size, so having moored up on the expensive pontoon, we stayed for lunch for free and set off once again onto the very commercial Canal du Nord, promising that we would explore the ‘Historial’ Museum of Peronne and the town another time.

Milling about near Lille

So . . . after our failure to get onto the Canal de l’Espierre and Canal de Roubaix, we headed off south to get to Lille to meet Robert, the long way round, via the Escaut, Dunkirk-Escaut Waterway and the Deule!  (We had spent so long in the two boatyards this spring that our original intention of doing the Paris-Marne-Strasbourg-Toul circuit had been postponed till next year, so this year was a good opportunity to tackle some northern waterways.) 

We decided to overnight in the Bassin Rond at the junction of the Dunkirk-Escaut waterway and the Escaut as we had done 4 years ago.  We had loved the mooring then and did now, but 4 years ago it was virtually empty of moored boats but now there were many more, including several ex-commercial peniches.  We moored up with the help of the owner of COSMA, a historic 1960s working barge still virtually ‘as built’. 

The Bassin Rond is a lovely spot, nearly as nice as the Tournai Yacht club mooring but not as big.  Having met Stephan we decided to stay for 2 nights and invited him and his wife Florence for drinks and returned to COSMA for coffee the next day.  We had lengthy conversations with them both on the subject of commercial traffic and how it is regulated in France and began to understand his frustrations at the system, which has seen many of the smaller owner-operated commercial craft give up the struggle.

After another night en route we got to Lille where we found the Bras de la Citadelle mooring completely empty!!  Great! a good spot to rendezvous with Robert who was arriving on Eurostar for a long weekend. 

We sussed the buses to Lille Europe station and caught one the following morning to meet him.  We had a bit of a hiccup on the bus on the way there because the tickets wouldn’t ‘compost’ (stamp) in the machine on board.  Other travellers tried to help but it was the machine which was at fault, and eventually the driver got out of his seat, re-set the machine several times until finally it worked.  We had a good laugh with the driver over that, and amazingly when we returned with Robert, it was the self-same driver who this time had to explain to us in his non-existent English and our poor understanding of French, that he couldn’t drop us at the same spot where we had got on – roadworks had caused a diversion apparently!  Still, it all made for a fun ride.

We had lunch at the restaurant adjacent to our mooring (sadly in the pouring rain) and thus acquired its wifi password, so Robert was happy as he could continue ‘life as he knows it’ with his I-pad.

We decided on a short cruise north to the River Lys and Armentières where we spent a pleasant night with warm sunshine for evening drinks on deck.   Armentières was almost completely destroyed during the war and this was our first experience of being ‘in the battle zone’.                  

                          

The return to Lille went without incident apart from an inexplicably long wait at one of the locks.  This can often happen on the canals and can make planning a voyage tricky, but in this case we just couldn’t understand the lock-keeper’s rapid-fire French, so we just waited . . . and waited.

Having dropped Robert off in Lille after his weekend, we continued our cruise south towards the Somme. 

Out first stop was near to the junction with the now-closed Canal de Seclin, which we investigated on our bikes.  It was a lovely ride of about 5 kms to the terminus and the town, which like many small towns in France has the most beautiful 13^th century buildings, in this case the ‘Hôpital’. 

On the canals we’ve noticed several widenings in the canal called ‘Gare d’Eau’ on our maps.  The one south of Lille – 300m long and offline, behind an islan,d is marked with a ‘P’ sign.  It was entirely empty of boats, so we entered rather gingerly, and found to our surprise that the depth was pretty good on the whole though along the edges some parts were a bit shallow for RICCALL.  Bollards were installed at regular intervals and after some probing with the long barge pole, we found a couple with adequate depth.  A short cycle ride into the village took us to a small supermarket with most essentials we might require.  How come such a good off-line mooring has been effectively abandoned?

We woke up to heavy mist the next morning and delayed our departure but it soon cleared and we headed towards the Canal du Nord. 

At Douai we found a good mooring and went off exploring on our bikes.  We rode along the Scarpe Inferieure which has been closed for about 10 years due to a road bridge at Raches near the Douai end.  After about 6kms we found it, all renewed and with its hydraulics intact, seemingly operational but not yet opened!  This one bridge prevents use of a perfect short cut.  What a waste of a lovely canal!

We also found near Douai an amazing water and adventure park, which was clearly very popular with the local children.  Of course this was during the school summer holidays, but it was great to see everyone enjoying the various pretty new facilities – including a fantastic climbing and tree-top area where children and parents alike wear hard hats and clipped-on safety harnesses and negotiate the high level obstacle course and zipwires.  (A cornet in glorious sunshine provided the ice-creaming on the cake.)

Close to this we also found a brilliant town mooring, in the centre of Douai, with water and electricity, on the line of the old through-town canal now closed, with just one cruiser mooring up on it as we rode up, but we were dissuaded from moving onto it by a very low-looking bridge which would have meant a hasty roof removal.  Not this time, but perhaps . . .

So after these explorations we continued onto the Nord and up to the summit level – 7 up-hill locks to negotiate first, behind a commercial, whose captain we got to know quite well during all that effort. 

However, after the last lock he continued to the tunnel while we (chickens!) moored up 6kms before it for a quiet night.  We had an unexpectedly easy passage through the tunnel the next day which happened to be a Sunday.  The tunnel is 4kms long and in the middle is a 1km long lay-by!!  Boats start at each end at the same time and then in the middle they pass in the lay-by.  Traffic lights indicate who does what and when.

So the tunnel behind us, we continued down the 5 locks to the junction with the Somme, which winds its way through a delightful area of lakes and etangs on which are many little boats and fishing shacks.  Louise had acquired a book ‘Spring on the Somme’ by Arthur R Taylor to read while travelling the Somme, and she would thoroughly recommend it to anyone, particularly anyone making the same trip.  It was fascinating, amusing and very informative.  (It’s always great to have a book about the area through which you are travelling.)

Mooring up seemed very problematic before the very first lift bridge, as GRAND DUTCHY, a narrowboat we had come across in Toul, and a cruiser were moored on the very inadequate quay.  We hovered around a bit looking perplexed, but quickly MV MALANTA’s captain Fred offered to move off, let us in and moor on us.  So kind!  But that’s how some boaters are.  So of course, aperos on RICCALL followed!  A good omen we felt for our cruise on the Somme.