Finally the weather has warmed up! In fact it’s so hot now we can hardly bear it
– 38C the other day and 34C for four days in a row! Typical!
From one extreme to the other in a matter of 2 or 3 days. We Northerners need time to acclimatise!
We left Sens while it was still cool and took our time (5
days) getting to Auxerre, staying at various places on the way including
Villeneuve which was nice enough and Joigny, an interesting little town set on
a hillside, with some very old and interesting timbered buildings. The moorings however, were unfortunately
rather poor and we did gently make our views known to the Tourist Information
Office staff.
At Auxerre we saw David Almond’s boat CARMEN, and went for a
catch up and news of the possibility of a mooring there while we return to the UK for Sophie’s
christening. We had last seen David on
the Canal du Midi two years ago when we were both waiting to get through a
lock, with a dozen other hired plaisances (bumper boats!). He had good news for us: yes, a mooring was
available at reasonable cost just behind his own boat. Great relief, as a safe spot for Riccall with
electricity is pretty hard to find.
We had moored on the town quay at Auxerre which shows signs
of a recent, very comprehensive upgrade, but sadly the water and electricity
bournes have not yet been connected.
However, it was a lovely town and an excellent place for our boating
friends Keith and Louise of SALTIRE to spend the night with us on their way
south to their boat at Moissac. They
arrived around 2pm so we had a wander around the beautiful, ancient town of Auxerre with its little
winding streets and alleyways on steep inclines surrounded by timber framed
houses everywhere, and we even managed to squeeze in an excellent stop for
liquid refreshment! These towns are quite amazing: there must be at least three
spectacular churches in Auxerre as well as the Cathedral, and we duly went and
saw the rest the following day. After a
further night we felt we must move on and decided our next mooring would be at
the Caves de Bailly.
We are now on the Nivernais
canal proper and here the locks close for lunch from 12pm - 1pm. This is fine
for us as we like to stop for lunch ourselves, though sometimes it can be
somewhat difficult if there are no moorings at the next closed lock! On one occasion we came off a river section
and entered a very short sloping sided entrance to the lock. The lockkeeper wasn’t there, the lock was
full, and it was lunchtime. There were
no mooring possibilities of any kind, and the sloping side meant we couldn’t
get off to take a line to anything ashore.
We ended up sticking the boat hook across the wide gap into the ground
and tying up to that!
As it happened, on the way to Bailly, again the last lock
before the mooring was closed for lunch when we got there and this time we had
to use a totally inadequate quay about 4 metres long (admittedly with two good
bollards) but loads of rocks just below the water surface. We managed to hang on while we had lunch and
Alex leapt off Riccall to scout ahead and see if there was room on our planned
mooring. Yes! Just 3 boats and plenty of room for us. When we finally got there two of the boats
had already gone and the third left half an hour later, so we had the place to
ourselves: a really excellent mooring with water and leccy by jeton.
A short walk up the hill were the Caves de Bailly- a
cooperative wine organisation which had taken over the underground excavations
formed during stone quarrying work many, many decades ago. Really stone mines rather than coal
mines. The underground caverns run to
about 4 hectares and maintain an ideal temperature for the production and
storage of the millions of bottles of wine made there.
One of the most amazing things about this underground
facility was the sheer size of some of the areas without support. The roof wasn’t domed or supported by
pillars, but completely flat 12 feet above our heads, spanning an area
sometimes more than 30 x 60 metres. When
you think of the weight of the hill above, some 200m in height, you wonder how
it could possibly be self-supporting
We took the €5 guided tour and were lucky enough to be
joined by only one other couple (British) and so the guide was able to speak
only English to us all – and excellent English she had too. It was a fascinating tour, well worth the
money and at the end we got a glass of two types of Cremant to taste and to
keep the glasses afterwards! Needless to
say we did buy a couple of bottles at the typically slightly inflated cave
prices but it was all worth it. We also
bought the jetons for the electricity and water at €1 each – for 12 hours
electricity or half an hour of water.
The mooring itself was free!
Our friends Mike and Jean from our UK narrowboating days had arranged to spend a
night with us on their drive to Spain
and this was a perfect spot for them to find us: quiet road right beside the
mooring and even a safe car park.
We had a great evening with them, then the following day,
after they had set off we were joined on the mooring by a small British barge
called Unique (well they all are pretty well unique, aren’t they? – almost as
bad as us calling our narrowboat ‘The Boat’!!)
We had pleasant apéros with Tony and Heidi and the next day we were on
our way again.
One other notable thing about the Canal du Nivernais (apart
from its lack of depth) is the height of the bridges. Our Breil Guide tells us that they all have
3.4m clearance, expect a few which it marks up as specially low. In fact most of them are more than 3.6m high
(our wheelhouse height) but the ones marked as low are usually the wrong
ones!!! So, for a lot of the time, we
are cruising ROFF and marking up each bridge in our book as we come to it, as
to whether we needed to be ROFF or RON.
So far there have only been three that were definite ROFFs so as it’s so
hot we have done the last couple of days with the roof on and going very slowly
when approaching the bridges. And no
problems as yet.
Our last mooring was at a pleasant little village called
Chatel-Censoir, in an ex-hire-boat basin.
The hire company, Le Boat, had closed down but the water and electricity
were still on and all free so that was nice and we stayed a couple of
days. The basin was a bit tight for our
boat but we knew there would be no trouble turning when the overnighting hire
boats had left in the morning. However, one particularly large one was still
there at 10.00 on the day we wanted to leave, so Alex asked the English hirers
when they might be leaving. They said
they were just going up to the village for shopping and they would be away by
11 o’clock. Fine! We were in no hurry. So at 11am they got back on board, released
the ropes, THEN started the engine. We
could see immediately that they had a problem as they started to drift away
from their pontoon in the light breeze, without any power, in our direction. The captain then tried again and got forward
thrust but no steering and no reverse.
By this time they were heading straight for us! However we managed to deflect them and took a
rope so they could moor up behind us.
Perfect! Now we could get out of the
basin and they could ring Le Boat to try and sort their
all-electronically-controlled boat!
We moored up for that night, nestling on the mud a metre
away from the edge of a little off-line divit in the canal. And then we set off for our last stop before
the water depth runs out(!) Clamecy
would have to be the end of the line for us, as we have heard dire tales of
empty pounds a short way upstream. So
then it will be time to turn round and do it all again in the other direction!
However getting to Clamecy presented its own problems.
First, a lock was turned against us where the river crosses the canal and we
had to back off into the flood lock to avoid being swept to the weir. The next flood lock was at a very sharp angle
and Alex suddenly decided he was going too fast and did an emergency stop!
Which of course disturbed all the water and made getting through all the
harder! Then we went the wrong side of
an island in the river (Louise mis-read the map!) and then to cap it all, we
took the wide, high, middle arch of the bridge into Clamecy and immediately
went hard aground. This time it was not
our fault, as neither the bridge nor our canal guidebook showed the correct
arch to use. Normally, at this stage, we
settle down and have lunch, and it WAS nearly 12 o’clock, but the lock keeper
eventually saw our plight, and explained which arch we should have used,
and said he would lower the sluice on the weir ahead to raise the water level
and sweep us back through the bridge arch.
This duly happened with remarkably little turmoil (either for the boat
or the captain and crew!) So then it was
through the right arch, into the lock and up into the mooring basin.
