July 11, Vouecourt to Chaumont
As we were preparing the boat to leave this morning – a patisserie truck came around and Dave dashed over to get us some pain au raisin, croissants, and baguettes. What a great idea for a little village that has no shop. The French are very particular about their bread – fresh bread every day is a must. Of course, the bread isn’t fresh at all after the day on which it is baked, so I can see their reasoning.
Today we will travel 20k and transit 10 locks, a very short tunnel, and go under 4 drawbridges. These bridges pull up on one side rather than in the middle and they are very narrow going through – about the same width as a lock but the bridge is not always drawn straight up so we have to be very careful to stay along the side opposite the bridge itself. Going under the bridges, like going into and out of the locks, requires my dashing from one side of the wheelhouse to the other and announcing how far we are from each side, if we are going in straight, what – if anything – we are likely to hit, be it on the boat itself or the bridge or the side or entrance to the lock. After Marion bid us good-bye at the first lock, our lock keeper was another young woman who does not speak one word of English and was twenty minutes late opening the second lock – apparently she overslept. Unfortunately she has the personality of an escargot. A late lock opening delays us on our schedule. We have to let the lock keepers know how far we will be traveling each day, what time we will be at the first lock in the morning and they take a lunch break from 12 – 1:30, so where we are at that time can be important as it is a bit difficult to just sit in front of a lock for an hour and a half with no place to which to tie the boat – we basically just float and occasionally adjust our position. It is generally hot and there is no way to get off the boat. Things being the way they are we got through one lock at 11:55 and only had a little over 1km to the next lock where we waited until 1:30. One of us has to stay at the wheel so it is not a relaxing time, added to the fact that there is very little breeze at mid-day and the wheelhouse is about 90 degrees inside. I fix us some lunch and we re-plot the course for the afternoons travel based on how far we have gotten at lunch time. Since the locks close at 6 in the evening and there are relatively few places for a boat this size to tie up for the night along this canal, accurate planning is essential. We want to go as far as we can but have to be assured of a place that we can tie up the boat. Since a lock takes about 15 minutes to go through, a twenty minute delay in the morning can put us one lock short at lunchtime, and consequently perhaps one lock short at the end of the day, or several kilometers short of our intended destination if we then can’t get where we want to go by 6.
The particular lock that we were waiting to go in had a drawbridge just before the entrance to the lock, and it was not completely straight up. As we were approaching the bridge, we were trying to stay to the left side with the bridge on the right, and everything seemed to be lined up until we got our bow into the opening and the weir outlet in front of the bridge suddenly pushed our stern to the right side of the opening. In the time it took me to go from the left side of the wheelhouse to the right to check our position, the stern had swung around and the aft handrail was clearly not going to make it. At that point the handrail was about 4 inches behind the bridge itself and there wasn’t even time to say anything constructive or helpful. The top rail aft of the opening by the wheelhouse door slammed into the bridge and one by one, the sections of the handrail behind it buckled and were ripped off the deck. Now not only had we crumpled three five foot long sections of handrail – the bends and breaks caused the rail to extend about eighteen inches beyond the side of the boat. Since that is about the total amount of clearance we have when going into a lock, or under a drawbridge, we had a new problem of not being able to fit; or if we could squeeze in, then if we hit the handrail on the opening or side of the lock, it would alter the position of some other part of the boat and make it vulnerable to damage. We were able to get into the lock, and out again, but the handrail scraped against the side all the way in and out. The next lock consisted not only of a lock, but then a tunnel and another drawbridge! In that lock Dave had a solution that consisted of my tying the bow to the bollard, and he rammed the side of the boat consistently on the side of the lock to try to bend the railing back; it didn’t work since two of the vertical posts were broken off at the base. We only had one more lock to get through before our day was over and we limped into the mooring outside of Chaumont. It was a lovely place to tie up with water and electricity.
Chaumont is a large city but unfortunately the center was quite a few kilometers away and all straight uphill! I went for a walk and found a shopping center with huge stores – a supermarket, hardware store, garden store, furniture store, shoe stores, etc. but I only had a small bag with me and it was a long walk back to the boat so I didn’t buy anything.
The place the where the boat was docked was having a barbeque, concert and film right alongside of the dock. Dave and I took what we thought would be a short walk and wound up going about 2k straight uphill where we found one restaurant that was open and we had dinner there. When we got back to the boat, the concert was over and a film was playing – something apparently from the Cannes film festival – it was in some language other than French (or obviously – English) with French subtitles, we put our camp chairs on the forward deck and tried to watch but it was too weird so we decided to read instead.