Péronne to Berry-au-Bac, 11-16 June

Canal du Nord, Canal Lateral D’Oise, Rivers Oise and Aisne, Canal latéral à l’Aisne: Plague of flies at Pont D’Ercheu, télécommanding the locks, supper with Simon at Pont l’Évêque, surprising DIY success at Soissons, Eugenie and Inevitable at Vic-sur-Aisne, Californian Cindy and Emily at Bourg-et-Comin, it’s only lunch at Berry-au-Bac

Pont d’Ercheu and Noyon (Pont l’Évêque)

When I say a plague of flies, I really do mean a pestilential visitation of Biblical proportions. I’ll only ever remember Pont D’Ercheu for the thousands that somehow swarmed in – and, when I went down to make lunch, rose like a cloud from the kitchen sink. Disgusting!

Over the next 24 hours, armed sometimes with a Havaiana, sometimes with a flicky tea-towel, I fine-tuned my fly-slaying skills. Furry little corpses littered floors and furniture and floated in sinks and toilets, and still there came more.

Fortunately, flies sleep at night. But I was up for a run before 6am – my first since leaving England – and for that I have to thank an early riser of the resident fly community for buzzing the tip of my nose.

Running through the rye (?) at Pont D’Ercheu

Our second tunnel – at around a kilometre a shortie compared with the one at Ruyancourt – but a lot darker and quite tricky, was followed by just four gentle locks today: unexpectedly avalant (going down). Hurrah! Water being drained from a full lock chamber is a lot less frisky than water that’s pouring into an empty one.

Around a kilometre long, yet you can see the light at the end of the tunnel

Pont l’Évêque (this is in Picardy, note, not the famous one in Normandy where the eponymous cheese comes from) is a little fishing harbour a couple of kilometres from Noyon.

The port at Pont L’Évêque – us to the left, charming houses to the right, and not much open except the pharmacy and one boulangerie

Though it’s a port de plaisance, it doesn’t have a capitainerie office (though one is mooted for 2018). You pay your €10 at la poste, plus a couple of euros to a nearby machine to switch on the electricity and the water that will flow from the unit closest to your mooring.

It was a half-hour walk to Noyon Auchan shopping centre for the spray mouches that was to play a key role in the fly genocide I was plotting.

If there’s one thing I hate more than fly spray, it’s flies. Revenge is sweet!

Hardly had I cleared the gas chamber and sucked up the corpses with my trusty Dyson than Simon Piper of Piper Boats arrived to fix our faulty fuel gauge. (What a lovely holiday he must be having in France!) He also fixed a water-pump that – as luck would have it – started playing up just a couple of hours earlier.

For this, he and Roy had to heave out the built-in fridge-freezer to get at the gubbins behind it. (I trust you’re impressed by the depth of my technical vocabulary.)

Vic-sur-Aisne

It’s Karanja’s first birthday! Let us eat cake. Having left the Canal du Nord at Pont l’Évêque, we joined the Canal lateral d’Oise and headed for the River Aisne.

The pretty waterfront at Janville – or was it Thourottes?

Something new: a series of eight locks operated by a remote control device (une télécommande) that, according to the book, we’d pick up at Carandeau lock. After much halting discussion over the VHF radio with the éclusier there, who strongly denied having one for us, he finally relented and handed it over as we entered his lock.

As you approach an automatic lock that’s operated by remote control, you look for this grubby board, point your device at it, click and hope for the best…

Once you’re in the lock, you (that means I) have to sharply lift one of two parallel rods on the side of the lock to activate the mechanism to fill the lock (going upstream) or empty it (going downstream).

Once in the lock and tied up, you lift up the blue rod to close the gates and activate the emptying or filling of the lock – no, Verne, noooo! – not the red one!

Two friendly men guided us into the pleasant halte nautique at Vic-sur-Aisne, and within the hour we were drinking wine at a convenient alfresco picnic table with Bill and Vicky (barge Eugenie), Brits who live in South Africa; and Dave and Carol (barge Inevitable). They’re old friends who started their European adventure in 2009 and have long experience on the waterways of France, Holland and Belgium.

Carol, Dave, Bill, Roy and Vicky at Berry-au-Bac

Carol displays her “dingus” (South African slang for a “thing”) handy for lifting a rope over a high-placed lock bollard; I’d love to get me one, but until then I’ll have to continue climbing those slimy ladders

It’s a few minutes’ walk to the town centre, which boasts a castle, a well-stocked provision store, several boulangeries (one of which provided chocolate fondant cake to celebrate Karanja’s first birthday) and a handful of restaurants, mostly closed.

We’d carefully avoided “Le Welcome Cottage”, (7/7 restaurants in Vic, according to TripAdvisor), but didn’t fare much better at Le Dongon. Never mind, the people were nice.

Soissons

Only two locks today, and it was easy mooring in Soissons just a block or two from the centre ville.

… and here’s another view of us from a bridge

Determined to get another data card as a back-up, I found the Orange boutique – these map apps are great! – practised my French to good effect, and then wandered around to see the sights.

Saint Jean des Vignes, of which not much more than the brooding façade remains

Soissons has some interesting architecture…

... and more of the same — … no idea what this lovely little building is

The Troubles (Part One)

Disaster! I got home to find that the fridge-freezer had stopped working. It seemed that when Roy and Simon heaved it in and out of its spot on Monday, a wire had come loose.

So, to cut a long story short, I slid myself into the drawer space under the fridge and, armed with torch and iPhone camera, did a spot of elementary rewiring according to Simon’s instructions to Roy over the phone. It’s hard to convey the intensity of our joy and triumph when Roy flicked the switch on the wall and the thing purred back to life. (To be continued…)

Bourg-et-Comin

At Bourg-le-Comin, we met up with lovely Californian Cindy Sparks on our sister-boat Emily, awaiting the arrival of friends from California to crew for her on the next stage of her journey.

Cindy and I with Aperol spritzers before dinner on “Karanja”

Space being tight, we moored Karanja alongside a floating VNF platform, from which it was a bit of a leap of faith to the overgrown bank. Bravely, Cindy leapt over for drinks and dinner – and we’re looking forward to seeing her again on our journey south.

Cindy’s “Emily” (left) and our “Karanja” (right) – sister Piper boats at Bourg-et-Comin

Next morning, after a walk up to the village to buy a breakfast baguette from the boulangerie (this is becoming a terrible habit), we set off on the long and relatively lock-sparse stretch of the Canal latéral à l’Aisne for Berry-au-Bac.

Bagging a baguette at the Berry-au-Bac boulangerie

At first alone at the peaceful halte nautique, we were soon joined by the two lovely little Dutch sailboats that have joined us at several other places.