Châlons-en-Champagne (the lost ring)

We awoke to rain on the Tuesday of the seventh week of the French lockdown; apart from a spattering one night over the previous weekend this was the first rain for almost seven weeks.  This made us think of the irony of being allowed to start cruising in June when the lockdown restrictions commence easing, only to find out that if the dry weather continues there would be the danger of not being able to cruise because of low water levels 😆

Even though the weather has been glorious there has been a breeze most days, so we have had very few upside-down days since returning to Châlons at the beginning of March.  As it has been so warm we are able to leave the hatches open until nightfall and take advantage of the views during the evening.  Last Sunday was one of the stiller days and Karen managed to capture this from the open hatch:

Upside-down on Sunday evening

Sunday evening also saw the arrival of three terns that we believe were Common Terns although we’re not proficient enough birders to be sure.  We watched them diving for fish in a manner that Karen described as being akin to a plane crash landing.  For a bird that is so sleek and graceful, their entry into the water is completely the opposite; however, they seem to always come up with a fish, so the method seems to work.  The herons are still to be seen fishing but only a handful at a time at most.  Gorete managed to see the heads of young in one of the nests through her binoculars, but we haven’t been so lucky.  The rapid covering of leaves on the tree canopy hasn’t helped.

Heron fishing at the end of one of the ‘coronavirus’ barriers

Ardon has been spending some of her spare time painting one of the bollards outside her & Guy’s boat.  The bollard now looks like a large toadstool and she has also painted the names of the five boats and their owners who are currently locked down in the port with us.

Three of the boats: Sid & Jane on Sherborne, Nikki & Gorete on Puddleduck and us

Our daily walk takes us past a house with a pretty garden and this week the owners have been cutting their blooms and placing different ones outside each day for passers-by to take.  Karen has taken orange blossom and lilac sprays for table decorations on the pontoon.

Blooms for the taking and a poem

The essence of the poem is that without joy in your life you will lose strength and a house without flowers is a sad house so please help yourself.

Boat painting has had to continue as I have been finding it harder to have excuses not to do it.  I have now repainted the two roof panels at the front and started preparing the middle two panels.

Putting the first topcoat on the front two panels

The next areas to finish are the sides under the gunwales which have been prepped up to the last coat of undercoat.  As with the roof, I have had to use masking tape which wasn’t the easiest task to do considering it had to be done in the kayak.  

Applying masking tape along the gunwales

Believe it or not the crap in the water is an accumulation of pollen and tree blossom that we disperse every day or so by running the engine in gear.

Having the kayak out proved to be useful as a large (dead) deer was slowly drifting towards the boat.  We first noticed it a couple of weeks ago about a kilometre further upstream and it has been gradually moving down towards us.  Each time a commercial goes through the town lock enough water is used to cause a slight flow for a while.  The prevailing wind has been from the east lately and that has also helped to keep things moving.

So, I hopped into the kayak ready to move the deer past the moored boats quickly and hence avoid the stench permeating throughout the boat.  Of course, I had forgotten it had rained during the previous night and into the morning – my bottom half was immediately soaked!  I quickly jumped out and, as Gorete had been watching the antics, she helped me turn it upside down to remove the water.  As with all the dead animals with have had to deal with and help on their way downstream, I was loathe to prod it in case it exploded.  I found the best way to move it was to gently nudge it with the nose of the kayak.  I soon had it on its way towards the lock and paddled back to make the kayak fast beside our boat.

Jane from Lazybones at the other end of the port is keen on embroidery and has been keeping herself busy making things.  She gave us a lovely present of napkins during the week:

One of the Chalkhill Blue napkins 😊

One evening we were sitting outside having pre-dinner rosé with the girls when we heard Karen scream, she had popped into the boat to check on the dinner in the oven.  It sounded like she shouted that she had dropped her engagement ring down the sink.  As the sink doesn’t have a u-bend we thought it would be an easy job to flush it out.  Quick thinking Nikki suggested getting a pop sock which I held over the outlet while Karen ran water through but to no avail.  While we were trying to flush it out it transpired that it was an earring not her engagement ring that Karen had dropped so the panic level dropped somewhat.

The next step was to dismantle the outlet pipe which wasn’t as easy as it sounds as whoever put it together had used mastic to seal the joints.  With only one pair of water pump pliers I was getting nowhere so Nikki joined in with hers and we realised that we wouldn’t get it completely apart without damaging the outlet.  As I didn’t have a spare we left the sink out of action until the next day when I decided to clean everything up, apply silicone, tighten the joints back up and wait until I got replacement parts before finishing the job.  As is always the case, both types of silicone had dried up and were unusable.  Nikki lent us hers and that was OK, but the nozzle leaked so I got into far more mess than I usually do.  Anyway, in the end I got everything back together but, of course, when we tried it out later there was a leak so I’m back to square one. 

What I didn’t mention was that as far as Karen was concerned it wasn’t a disaster because when I was cleaning the joints before tightening them up, I found the missing earring!  The moral of this story is that jobs not on the job list invariably take longer than those on the list.

To sign off for this week, here are the latest windmills the girls have added to the pontoon garden.

Châlons-en-Champagne (French, what French?)

The sunny weather has continued for another week and, with no rain, we are watering the plants daily.  This is a welcome chore as it gives us one more thing to do each day during our lockdown which is now in its sixth week.  Ironically we do find that time seems to fly by and, although we are up by 7.30 at the latest each day, it seems we have only just finished breakfast and mid-morning coffee break before we realise it is practically lunchtime. In a similar vein, it is often nine at night before we sit down and relax for the evening.

There are plenty of butterflies around including what seems like more Holly Blues than usual.  One took an unusual liking to Buddy the other day.  He had just finished cooling down by standing in the River Marne when one was attracted to the drying mud on Buddy’s back.  This behaviour by butterflies is often seen as they imbibe moisture/minerals from the edges of puddles and, less attractively, from fox poo.

Buddy’ s Holly Blue

Whenever Karen returns from her walk, she always has something to report.  I suppose that with each day being the same, anything away from the norm tends to stick out.  For example, Wednesday’s highlight was seeing a breakdown truck with a car on its flatbed.  Nothing unusual in that she thought, until she noticed the car driver who, rather than being seated next to the truck driver, was still sitting in his car on the back.

The next day she was stopped by a gendarme and had to show her attestation and ID.  She was told she was in a forbidden area and was asked to leave it.  She knew it was forbidden as it was a public park but had only gone a dozen feet or so into it to dispose of a poo bag in the requisite receptacle.  As she was stopped after making the deposit, she found it difficult to describe what she had been doing as we have never learnt the French to describe what she had just done! 

Buddy cooling down one morning

I know there has been a lot of talk about the increased use of group video calls for family and friends during the lockdowns and we have been doing exactly that with our children.  During the week we had our first ‘friends’ session which turned out to be good fun – talking with fellow boaters, Chris & Sue Hutchins and Mike & Lesley Fielding in the UK.  One of the questions that came up for us was, ‘How is your French coming on?’. This brought home to us that we are not talking French at all this year as we are not able to meet people.  At the most, we do supermarket French: ‘No we don’t have a store card’ and ‘Yes, we will pay by card’.  This is almost less than tourist French when all you need to know is how to order drinks in a bar 😉

It seems likely that the general public will have to wear face masks when the restrictions start being lifted over here so Karen took an hour or so out to make a couple of masks.  The other reason for making them is that we would want to wear a mask if we catch the virus.

Our homemade face masks

The good weather has meant that I have had no excuse but to carry on with the boat paintwork prep, although I haven’t found it too strenuous as it has to stop before lunch as the steel boat becomes too hot to touch on the outside by then.  A new excuse has arisen over the last couple of days though: the wind.  It really has been too breezy to risk paint specks appearing on the girls’ boat next door.  We remember someone painting next to us on the towpath in the UK a few years ago and realised a few days later that we had specks over our boat which could only have come from our neighbours.

I mentioned last week that we had been watching up to ten herons fishing at once along the waterfront next to our mooring.  This only lasted for three days and we are now lucky to see more than three or four at a time.  We have no idea why the numbers have gone down, is it the wind direction, the clarity or otherwise of the water or what?  What we have seen though, are two more dead deer, one on the towpath and one in the cut itself.  They were both too far gone to see if they had been shot or not.

When anyone in the port goes shopping, they always ask on the port WhatsUp group if anyone else needs anything.  This is very useful if you suddenly realise that, due to a miscalculation, you have run short of something as it saves risking meeting people during an unwanted trip to a shop.  When Jan asked the group on one day, Karen responded saying she wanted some epinard (spinach) but something went wrong in the message delivery as Jan came back with blettes (chard):

It did allow Karen to keep to her, ‘One new recipe a week’ notion she is following during the lockdown.  That evening we had a delicious chard, lemon and cheese pie:

Another thing mentioned last week was that we had both found an Orange Tip butterfly egg apiece.  We have been checking them every day but, sadly, on Sunday they had both disappeared.  They seemed to have completely gone as we couldn’t even find caterpillars that may have hatched.  As a sort of compensation, whilst continuing the search, Karen found a batch of Large White eggs on a nearby plant.

Eggs of the Large White butterfly

Our plants have started flowering, especially the petunias, and Gorete has made the pots even more colourful with the addition of some windmills.  The nasturtium and sweet pea seedlings are coming on well and we are getting close to having to pot them on. 

Our colourful pontoon

We celebrated the end of another week of lockdown by sharing a meal with the girls on Monday evening, during which we realised that our weekends have extended to include Mondays 😊

Now it’s time say goodbye until the same time next week.

Châlons-en-Champagne (herons - a welcome replacement for anglers)

What’s going on here then?

As we entered our fifth week of lockdown, we learnt last night that the next extension is for a further four weeks until 11^th May.  No doubt there will be a gradual relaxing of restrictions at some point, but it is looking increasingly unlikely we will be allowed to cruise for a few months yet ☹

Like most other countries, the French salute their key workers every night at 8.00pm with hand clapping, horn tooting, flag waving etc.  We join in on our boats by tooting the horns and waving flags with the residents in the cottages on the other side of the port.

Gorete & me flag waving while Nikki & Karen were horn tooting

A recent drawback of the lockdown is that recycling collections have been stopped and all recycling has to go into the general waste.  Although we believe we avoid buying products with excess packaging, it never ceases to amaze us the amount of recycling that still builds up while living on a narrowboat.   

One more thing to mention about the lockdown: we had another visit from the police this week.  As with a previous week it was while the girls were doing pontoon pilates.  Once again, they gave the girls a thumbs up and let them carry on.  Either someone had reported the activity or the policemen just wanted to watch them 😉  People walking past the port on the other side of the wall can see over and, we imagine, are probably quite jealous that we have a secluded area to sit out in compared with those that live in flats in the town.  They tend to acknowledge us with a ‘bonjour’ and a wave, but we have noticed a couple of people taking pictures. 

We were still getting some people walking illegally through the park each day so spent some time this week making the council barriers more robust.  This seems to have helped and only two or three people manage to get through each day now.

Encouraged by the lack of human activity the waterline next to us has become a haven for the herons in our heronry.  For the last couple of days we have been watching them vie for fishing places and line up along the bank.  Most of the day we can count eight of them, although this morning we could see nine while having breakfast - a far more pleasing sight than the fishermen that used to sit along this stretch.

Karen pretending to be on heron-watch

Looking at the picture above, the heronry is in the trees on the island to the right and the herons line up to fish along the waterfront of the park on the left right along to the edge of our pontoon.  Karen has threatened, when she finds the time, to get the camera out and hopefully get some good shots of the herons.

Whilst on wildlife, Karen has also been taking a keen interest on a pair of swans nest building just up from the river lock when going for her early morning walk.  They have now finished building and are taking turns to incubate the eggs.  Swans are unusual in sharing this activity as it falls to the female for most waterfowl.

The resident port swans

It’s lovely to see all the spring butterflies on the wing but a little sad that we probably won’t see more than a dozen or so further species this year unless restrictions are lifted and we’re allowed to travel further than a kilometre from the boat.  We have found our first Orange Tip eggs of the season so will watch them daily as they change colour to bright orange before the caterpillars emerge.  Assuming they escape becoming tasty bird morsels, we can then track them until they turn into chrysalises.  Of course, we hope we can escape Châlons in the boat before they emerge as butterflies next spring 😉  

Orange Tip egg on the underside of a garlic mustard (aka hedge mustard) leaf

If you look for Orange Tip eggs, you will rarely find more than one per plant as the caterpillars are (unusually) cannibalistic.  As well as searching for them on garlic mustard plants they can also be found on cuckoo flower (aka lady's smock), their other food plant.

Garlic mustard in flower

Orange Tips belong to the pieridae or white family of butterflies to which the infamous ‘cabbage whites’ belong.  Actually, there is no such butterfly as a cabbage white; it is a term used for the few butterflies whose caterpillars feed on cabbage type plants (brassica).  In the UK and northern France these are the Small White and the Large White.  Unfortunately, there are several other whites that do not feed on these plants, but they still get killed by over-zealous gardeners and allotment holders.  This is a male Green Veined White taken by our lock yesterday showing the distinctive green veins on its underwings.

Male Green Veined White

I know the pedants and purists among you may well be cringing about my capitalization of the butterfly names above.  It is something that I don’t usually do but I feel that it makes it easier to read and understand, especially when talking about small and large whites.

On Saturday evening Guy dropped off a basket of easter eggs on all the occupied boats that Ardon had kindly made up.

Our easter eggs from Guy & Ardon

I must admit that I have now run out of excuses to not get on with touching up the boat paintwork.  This week I have prepped a couple of sections of the roof (there are six altogether) and managed to get as far as applying the first undercoat.  The spell of fine weather over the last three weeks that finally spurred me on has also encouraged our seeds to germinate.  We now have sweet pea and nasturtium seedlings but are still waiting for the chillies to emerge.

The girls came back from their daily walk one day full of excitement.  They believed they had found some undiscovered painted manhole covers to add to our collection.  After a quick check we found that three of them were new bringing our total to 82, no wonder they were excited!

One of the newly discovered covers

Back to the picture at the top asking what was going on.  We get the occasional dead animal floating slowly past us and, with a little nudging using a barge pole or boat hook, we manage to help them on their way towards the lock and therefore out of smelling range.  Not only do they smell badly but we worry the dogs will show an interest so that’s another reason for getting rid of them.  We call them bombs as they swell up and we have to be very careful not to poke them too hard and make them explode ☹ This week our visiting bomb was a hedgehog which stubbornly hung around for a couple of days.  In the end Gorete and I fished it out and took it into the park to bury it out of harms way:

 

To finish this week’s update, here is a picture of Ellis now he is four months old.

Châlons-en-Champagne (Our pontoon garden)

Last week’s blog update covered the building of a garden for the dogs to exercise in; this week we have concentrated on our own garden.  We are putting our pots on the pontoon this year rather than adorning the boat.  This will ensure I have as few excuses as possible for not getting on with patching up the paintwork on the roof. 

Our pontoon garden

The eagle eyed will have noticed that we have fewer pots than usual and have had to improvise.  You may remember that our favourite two earthenware pots were stolen from the roof last year when we were moored in a dodgy part of Paris. We also had to discard a few before winter because they had reached the end of their lives.  With the lockdown it’s not possible to buy non-essential items such as plant pots so we have used plastic bags, turned inside out, and also a hessian shopping bag we found floating in the cut.

Most but not all our herbs survived the winter

The dogs are oblivious to the lock down and spend all day sunning themselves on the pontoon or rolling on the dusty ground in their garden area.

Looks like Gorete is oblivious to it too!

Mentioning Gorete reminds me that neither Karen nor I have been stopped by the police yet whereas everyone else in the port has, in fact Gorete has now been stopped three times to show them her attestation (certificate to leave home) and ID. 

A modified certificate has now been introduced and the electronic version generates a QR code which we have noticed carries the date and time it was generated.  This will stop people cheating and putting an incorrect time on the form so they can stay out for longer than they should.

I said I left at 14.10 but the QR code has recorded 14.07

Karen and the girls are still doing their pilates every morning on the pontoon and have had a tacit police approval.  One morning a police car turned up, the two guys inside sat and watched the girls for a while and drove away.  They probably couldn’t fault the fact that they were all keeping their distance and were, in effect, in their own gardens on the pontoon at the end of their boats.

Having pontoon pilates every morning sets up a structure for each day and we have fallen into a routine that suits us as we enter our fourth week of lock down.  We take Buddy for an hour walk along the river Marne every afternoon but as the weather has got somewhat warmer the distance covered has fallen off.  We blame the fact that we have to stop to watch the increasing number of butterflies and also allow Buddy to play in the water to cool off.  If we hadn’t been standing still on Saturday watching a butterfly at rest, then we would have missed an adult grass snake slithering off the warm sand into the long grass.

A peacock butterfly the worse for wear after hibernating over winter

The plan is to do a big, out-of-town, supermarket shop in the car every two weeks and top up with fresh fruit and veg once a week at the small supermarket in town.  It’s amazing what we find stimulating when following the same routine each day.  For example, on the way to the local shop Karen had taken the main road into town and noticed lines of barriers on the pavement outside the closed post office but couldn’t work out why they were there. Setting off on our walk later in the day we noticed that the post office was now open, and the barriers were controlling a queue where everyone was keeping their distance.  It had been closed for some while and clearly they were expecting a large number of people when it opened.  The police were checking attestations and IDs as people arrived to join the queue.

Barriers outside the post office before it opened

On the same fruit & veg shop day, Karen returned full of excitement because she had taken a detour where she hoped there would be few if any people.  The detour was along a couple of back streets that were new to us and she was excited because she found five painted manhole covers that we hadn’t seen before.  These brought our total to 79; remarkable considering that when we briefly visited Châlons for a few days last July we didn’t see any.

Two of the latest covers…

…and yet more excitement: an éclusier adjusting a sluice to one of the canals through town

Some while ago, Chris & Sue gave us a sun catcher that they had made especially for our boat.  Having never thanked them properly I have included a picture of it here.  As you can see, the sunny weather really brings out the chalkhill blues painted on the glass. 

Our sun catcher inside the boat…

… and Karen being a sun catcher outside

Karen was having a relax before sharing our Sunday evening barbeque with the girls next door.   They provided mussels for the starter which was the first time we have had them for some months, so they were most welcome.  Before tucking into the main course, Nikki brough Karen up to date with her latest project.  Karen had mentioned a few days previously that it would be interesting to get hold of a spreadsheet showing various figures relating to Coronavirus.  With children in four countries across Europe we like to keep an eye on how things are progressing.  Nikki, as usual, had grasped the mettle and put together a program to extract data from a website and display it on a small screen to show the four countries on a rolling display.  She was quite distraught that she hadn’t managed to get it to interface with a larger screen.

Nikki’s latest project

I’ve already mentioned butterflies but not the bird life.  Things have really changed on the water as the geese, herons, cormorants and other waterfowl are all paired up and very quiet now they have established their territories and are concentrating on nest building or incubating eggs.  The only bird sound we hear now is the dawn chorus and the occasional angry goose attacking swans that venture too close to its nest. 

Our first ducklings have arrived

The main thing I have done this week is get our VR post box catalogue up to date.  If you want to learn about the history of the different types of Victorian post boxes, then click on ‘VR Boxes’ under the ‘Miscellany’ menu on the right-hand side.  I’ve now got to find time to add a section showing the boxes seen by family members and friends who have sent in their sightings 😉

With the very real prospect of not being able to cruise this year we are all waiting to hear how the town proposes to charge us, if at all, for being here throughout the summer.