Vitry-le-François (why does it happen to us?)

A YouGov poll in the last couple of days reckons that 55% of French people don’t want Brits coming over to France because of the way the UK has, or rather hasn’t, handled the Covid-19 situation.  We have to admit that we don’t blame them either.  When we heard about this figure we were reminded of our apprehension when we first came over here.  One of the regulations in mainland Europe is that boats must fly their national flag, so we fly the Red Ensign.  This was what made us worried when we came over as we would be easily recognised as Brits and our concern was that we wouldn’t be welcome because of Brexit.

As it turned out, we encountered the opposite and were welcomed everywhere and many people we spoke with felt sorry for us 😉  When we thought about the YouGov poll a bit more and looked at the detail we found out that those polled lived in tourist hotspots like Paris and the Riviera. This puts a completely different spin on the figures and to reinforce our findings, every French person we have spoken to since we started cruising again has been as friendly and polite as we would normally expect.

We’re not including much about our sightseeing in the blog at the moment as we went up and down this section of the Canal latéral à la Marne last September and covered many of the villages we went through. If you want to catch up on any of those visits then they can be found by clicking on September 2019 in the blog archive to the right, e.g. this is the entry for when we were at Soulanges where we are moored currently.

We drove to Couvrot on Tuesday morning, left the car at the lock and walked back to the boat at Soulanges, stopping halfway to have a picnic.  It was one of those half-cloud days and was warm rather than hot which was a pleasant change, especially for Buddy but he still had his daily paddle in the river.

The River Marne looking quite different to the navigable sections we’ve been on

Buddy relaxing while we had our picnic

It felt to be a subdued day even though it was Fête Nationale/Bastille Day.  Normally there would have been large groups of people barbecuing and picnicking by the river, but this year the groups were small due to the lockdown restrictions in force.  A grandfather, walking his granddaughter in her buggy, stopped to pass the time of day with us as we were sitting outside.  He was interested in boats as two of his cousins run commercials. He was particularly fascinated to hear that we had been on the various canals around Paris.  He also explained that this year the Fête Nationale festivities were being kept low key but next year they would celebrate in style 😊

Later on, once the temperature had dropped, I got on with painting some of the engine bay.  You wouldn’t have thought a four-year-old boat would need its engine bay repainting, but we had an issue when we left the boat for a couple of weeks in 2018. Because the back deck is exposed to the elements, drain channels are installed around the deck.  Rainwater falling on the back deck runs into the channels which have sloping tubes running through the sides of the hull, so water runs straight into the cut rather than into the engine bay.  A weekly task is to ensure the channels and tubes are clear as leaves and general muck soon builds up especially in the winter. 

On the occasion in 2018 I had forgotten to clean them before leaving the boat while we went away for a couple of weeks and consequently the bilge filled with water.  This normally wouldn’t be an issue as the bilge pump comes on when the water depth reaches a certain level.  Unfortunately, the bilge pump had chosen this point to pack up, so we returned to a boat with a flooded engine bay.  Boats have been known to sink if enough water enters the bilges like this ☹

Anyway, the standing water had formed a layer of rust on the bottom of the engine bay.  I cleaned it up at the time but never got around to treating and repainting it, but it’s now reached the top of my job list.

Moored at Soulanges

We were just about to cast off on Wednesday mooring when a commercial appeared next to us about to go down the lock near our mooring.  He had practically come to a standstill, so I turned around to check the lock lights.  There was no flashing orange light which would have indicated the operating system had registered the request to get the lock ready.  The next thing we knew was the boat was going backwards towards the twisty pole that triggers the lock operation.  They must have missed it or not turned it far enough.  They were second time lucky and the lock started setting itself, but it made us feel good that it’s not just us that get things wrong sometimes 😉

Commercial about to reverse

After setting off we planned to stop in the lock at Couvrot, where we left the car the previous day, as we knew there was a water point there.   Once in the lock, Karen started filling our four 20 litre containers.  The water pressure was so good that the containers were full by the time the boat was up. 

It was then a simple matter of lifting them over the railings and putting them in the cratch. Karen stood in the cratch to take them from me as I lifted them over.  We’re not really sure what happened, but one of the containers ended up in the water.  Karen went to get the wooden handled boathook as it would be stronger only to find the hook itself had become detached – another job for the job list.  We resorted to using the longer of our lighter boathooks and as I was lifting the container out of the water an éclusier turned up in his van to check everything was OK. I expect the central control centre for the canal had registered that a boat had gone into the lock but the magic eye hadn’t registered it as departing yet so they assumed there may be an issue.

Leaving Couvrot

We were now only a few kilometres from Vitry-le-François and approaching the lock where a motor yacht we were cruising with along here last year got into difficulties.  Near the entrance to the lock is a disused lock that joins the River Marne from the days when the river was still navigable this far up.

Our lock on the left – disused one on the right

Knowing that the motor yacht had had difficulties last year you would have thought that we would have been more circumspect.  We always cruise with the map book ready to hand as it provides a lot of important information such as which side of the lock the controls are on so you can make sure you tie up to the correct side.  For some reason we had been complacent and didn’t have the book with us on deck and made the assumption that the controls were on the left as they have been for all the locks since we set off from Châlons en Champagne six days ago.  Of course, our assumption was wrong, they were on the right.  Manoeuvring a narrowboat from one side of a lock to the other, when it only has a propeller at the rear and no bow thrusters at the front, isn’t that simple.  It’s not made any easier when you know your wife is standing on the roof at the front ready to loop a line over a bollard.

You may wonder why we operate locks like this over here.  In the UK, one of us would already be at the top on the lock side as we would have had to set the lock and open the gates by hand.  The one of us left on the boat would then pass a centre line up to the other.  Failing that one of us would climb the ladder in the side of the lock to take the line up.  As you can see above, ladders in French locks tend to be in a bad condition and generally too dangerous to use.  Also as locks are automatic, there are not usually lock landings or areas to drop crew off to set the locks.

We moored up for the day just before the outskirts of Vitry beside the ruins of old limekilns where there were some old bollards from when the quay was in use.  If you’re wondering why we always tie to bollards, it’s because of another difference between most UK and French canals.  In the UK we can generally moor anywhere and use mooring pins to secure the boat but on commercial canals it’s not possible to do this as the pins wouldn’t hold against the wake from the larger boats.   

Our Wednesday night mooring

We then walked back to Couvrot to retrieve the car and bring it near to our new mooring.  We have been noticing during our walks this week that there looks to be a bumper crop of walnuts this year.  There are two seasons for harvesting walnuts.  The first is in June when the soft fruit is picked for pickling and the second is in the autumn when they are harvested for the nuts themselves.  We had hoped to pick some for pickling but missed the picking season because we were back in the UK. Never mind, at least we will be here to harvest the walnuts when they ripen in the autumn like we did last year.

After lunch we drove into Vitry to do some food shopping.  Well, Karen did the shopping and Buddy and I went off to find somewhere we could leave the car in town.  We will either leave it there until we reach St Dizier and can catch a train back to get it or we will continue cruising, walking and driving every day like we have been doing this week as we are really enjoying this method of car leapfrogging especially as it means we can avoid public transport.

It had been a very muggy day as it was so cloudy, but the sun came out when we were doing all this, and we had a hot walk back to the boat.  Still, we were rewarded with quite a few clouded yellow and pale clouded yellow butterflies as we walked through a clover field (their foodplant).

We also found an old distance stone by the quay where we were moored.  It'll need some investigation to find out where the distances refer to, e.g. the bottom inscription reads 227 kilometres.  Our first thoughts are that it shows the distances to the Seine and the Rhone (we are currently on the main route between the two rivers).

While on distance stones, this canal has stone kilometre markers showing the distance from Dizy/Epernay at the northern end down to the southern end at Vitry-le-Francois.  Pk 2 is probably an original whereas pk 3 - 43 are relatively modern and pk 44 -  67 look like they were made some time between the original and the latest.

Pk 2 - original, pk 18 - modern, pk 53 - not so modern

On Wednesday we cruised six kilometres up two locks.  This is our route since we started six days ago: