We finally got back to Saint Jean de Losne on the 10th April and after a week of sorting the barge and taking on fuel we set off.
This year the plan is to ‘do’ the Canal de Centre, followed by the Loire Lateral, the Briare and finally the Seine up to Paris. After that it will depend on the amount of water available as to whether we carry on north via the Oise and Canal du Nord or the Marne and north through Reims and onto the newly opened Sambre.
After a few days we got to Fragnes, a port we loved when we last visited 12 years ago. The harbour-mistress Celine was the same and as helpful as she had been 12 years previously. We met Heidi and Marco the now owners of FINAL FLING and had enjoyable drinks and suppers with them over the following days.
We also caught up with David and Evie of L’ESCAPADE and Jim and Jehan of LES VIEUX PAPILLONS when we got to Chagny. They had been travelling in amiable convoy for some weeks.
Once moored up in the lovely little Halte of Saint Julien, we realised it was the perfect spot to consider painting the front of RICCALL. It is usually virtually impossible to reach the areas needing attention but this time we could moor the boat at right angles to the quay as next day the weather was forecast to be good and it was a Bank Holiday and all the locks would be closed so no boat traffic. In fact the job was quite quickly achieved and RICCALL looked immediately much better.
On this canal, the Canal du Centre, most of the bridges are just high enough for us to pass under without removing the roof, but after our experience on the Garonne Lateral last year, and as some of the bridges are marked lower in our book, we have decided to travel with the roof off. The downside of this is that we then cannot travel when it rains.
We arrived in the lovely port of Génélard after a nice day of warm sunshine and were interested in the enormous wall which had been built in the 1920s by Alfred Fournier (later partnered by M Mouillon). It was designed to hide the many shabby workshops and to create the illusion of a great modern factory!
But later, when Alex slipped slightly on the deck, we noticed that there seemed to be rather a lot of hydraulic oil at the base of one of the roof lift off rams. Oh dear! The seal is leaking!! This is a real problem as the leak may get worse the more we use the system and we need to use it every day on this canal.
The next-day weather forecast was for a 4-hour window before it rained – enough for us to move to the next port, Paray le Monial.
We lowered the roof, having removed some of the wheelhouse miscellany, and set off. Within half an hour the rain started. There are almost no mooring points on this canal between the main ports or haltes nautiques, so we covered the wheelhouse as best we could with tarps and took everything possible downstairs. And did it rain?! But after about an hour and a half it cleared up and we looked at the clouds around and hoped that that was it for a bit.
But No! Half an hour later it started again and this time it was even worse (we didn’t think that was possible).
By the time it stopped we, and everything in the wheelhouse, were drenched but when we arrived in Paray there was plenty of space and we moored up to tackle the enormous job of drying out the carpet tiles and everything else which had been soaked. It had been a truly dreadful day.
The next day though, the sun came out and we laid all the carpet tiles on the quay to get them dry and started to think about how to proceed with the now faulty roof ram. If we had not been so worried about it we could have raised the roof when it started to rain and not had all the problems we did have!
Alex started to do his research and actually managed to find a UK technical expert who even knew the person who had originally sold the rams to him all those years ago, Andy of Dennis Eagle. But despite Andy’s knowledge and help Alex could not locate a replacement ram anywhere in the UK so the decision was made to repair the old ram by having new seals installed.
But first things first – we needed to check that our ram could be repaired at home and that was confirmed, so we returned to Saint Jean de Losne to collect the car – 3 trains and a very helpful pick up at St Jean station from Rachel, our mooring companion this last winter.
Then we needed to attack the removal. We thought that removing the ram from its mountings after 15 years might prove really difficult but as luck would have it the pins came out with less difficulty than we had feared.
Then it was a case of loading it into the car and making a quick dash back to the UK to Steve – our friendly and local ‘Dr Ram’ - who managed to refurbish it within a very short time and at a very reasonable cost of £170.
While waiting for Steve to do the job, we managed a quick overnight trip up to Louise’s two sons and four grandchildren, and a meal out with our friends Carol and Jeremy.
We were back on RICCALL within the week and installed the ram the next day, but it was almost harder to get the pins back in than it had been to get them out and at one point Alex managed to spray himself liberally, really liberally, with hydraulic fluid!
Alex has always said that the roof off system had a finite number of operations! Most of the parts were used items in the first place, and things are bound to fail eventually. We will have the other ram refurbished this winter, even though it is working fine at the moment.
So just before setting off from Paray le Monial, we ventured into the town and were very impressed indeed. The famous Basilica du Sacre Coeur was just lovely and the town itself up-beat, spotlessly clean and very inviting.
(The roof lift-off went without incident which was a great relief, as did the roof-on later that day.)
The next town however, was very disappointing. Digoin we have renamed ‘the town of the dilapidated roofs’!! Everywhere in the town we saw roofs covered in ancient tarpaulins, not awaiting renovation but completely forgotten! The port was pleasant enough but we found a nice quiet mooring a little out of town much to the amazement of the passing inhabitants: clearly no boat had moored here before!
A few photos of things seen this month.
