On the Nivernais

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.