Blog 7 2018

BEFFES

A good day’s cruise brings us to a modern port just outside the tiny far-from-modern port of Beffes. We’re finally making progress now and walk in to look for a café to reward ourselves with a cup of coffee or maybe a beer, who knows? 2 beers later its 7 o’clock and the little restaurant we had passed across the road  serves us 2 wonderful steaks on hatchets (yes) and a bottle of delicious RED Sancerre. Who knew? OK, we didn’t and it was a pleasant surprise. We had assumed wrongly that all Sancerre wine was white. We rolled happily along the towpath that night.

After a day doing the washing, and Talksport delivering England 1 Croatia 2 we were eager to get going south again and pushed out at 0930 next morning. Then DISASTER.

After 100 yards or so for some reason Sue checks for coolant water coming out the return at the stern. This had bubbled out as usual when I started the engine but inexplicably was totally absent now a few minutes later.  This is NOT good.

Immediately we reversed back into the mooring and switched the engine off as fast as possible. Now what? Impeller? Unlikely as we had recently replaced it. No-one around (no port office here) and one boat left on the far pontoon so I wander over to hopefully pick his brains  The friendly owner is fortunately a French local and  tells me we are only about 5 kms from a marine engineer further upstream whose name he gives me. Sue by this time has stripped out the impeller which is intact. A call to ‘our’ engineer in St.Flo tells me; ‘it’s probably the pump- I did one last week- it cost 2000 Euros, fitted.’

Christ! ‘I’ll get back to you Didier’ (he is 2-1/2 to 3 hours each way to reach us at 60 Euros per hour before we start).

I call the local company and the guy tells me he’ll come and have a look later today. We sit and wait then amazingly at 12 0’clock (lunchtime!) a white van pulls up. An hour later after a thorough examination below the floorboards he confirms it’s the pump and he’ll call us later today with the price. His dedication to the task is duly noted and we decide to go with him.

Long story short, it’ll cost just short of 1000 Euros BUT it will take a week for the delivery even if we pay more for faster service (we tried, but it’s Bastille Day National holiday weekend). 7 days later the motor arrives by post from Marseilles and 9 nights after arriving in Beffes we go on our way again.

In between time we (Sue) had some stressful situations:

- shortage of ready cash and banks, so ordered some 500 Euros cash from the lady owner of the Chez Irene café (48 hours’ notice required and 1 Euro per transaction. No ATM’s here) to purchase food at the little supermarket in town.

-Sue managed to get WiFi in the grounds of the cyclist’s hotel opposite in order to contact the bank to transfer Euros to pay for the pump.

- at the  same time Sue managed to purchase extra G’s to keep our English company  ‘phone operational once she had managed to track Matt down for the password. Which was no easy task

-got confirmation from NHS (via Julia opening our mail) of Sue’s operation on 13^th September (after waiting from 2^nd February for this information) when we had told them we would be in France, PLUS they would need her to be available 2 weeks before that for a check-up but couldn’t confirm a date for that unless we accepted the 13^th Date. (Why send letters to an empty house?) Stress- we would have to go home early and re-plan things.

We swapped some Morbier smelly cheese we didn’t like with a Swiss boat in exchange for some dog-calming pills (Fireworks on 14^th July) .On the Sunday afternoon my new Swiss friend and I put on our blue T-shirts to go down to Chez Irene’s and support the French to beat the Croats 4-2 in the cup final on the Sunday afternoon and revenge the England defeat for us. An air horn helped with the atmosphere with the 20 or so customers in the tiny bar once our hearing returned. Car horns continued the cacophony well into the night as people drove round and round with young fans hanging out of the windows singing, shouting and cheering.

Where did England suddenly go wrong? They won’t get a clearer field than this year for a shot at the title.

Finally, after a farewell hatchet steak at Le Crozet des Chemins and some windy, but hot and stormy weather we were ready to leave with our new pump happily whizzing round and water spurting out of the rear of the boat to our great relief.  Bye-bye Beffes. (And Irene).

As we are still heading south into the sun, we put up the canvas winter hood to shroud the sides of the cockpit steering position, with windows zipped open and doors left off this gives some relief from the heat and easily folds forward at the frequent bridges.

We overnight at Le Guetin, en route for NEMOURS, and at 9 the next morning we have an appointment to pass through the huge double lock, the first of which is 9 metres deep (nearly 30ft).

At 8am Laddie and I set off on our quest for breakfast having spotted a potential boulangerie or possibly a simple depot de pain we had spotted near the restaurant the night before. The doors were open and several guys sipping coffee stared at us when we entered. There wasn’t a baguette or a croissant in sight but I asked the obvious question. ‘Boulengier en vacances m’sieur’ came the reply .And so the curse of the missing croissant struck again and we slunk off to give Sue the bad news and get the Coco Pops out again.

 By appointment with the eclusier the previous evening, Spot on 0900 we motored slowly into the lock spot on 0900 and were calm but apprehensive – scared in other words. When the massive doors close behind the boat you are in a huge dark cavern with slimy dripping walls and with a huge powerful waterfall about to be unleashed from a great height yards in front of the boat from the lock above. The experienced lockkeeper had lowered a hook on a line and hauled up our mooring ropes, passed them round an unseen bollard way above our heads, and passed the fore and aft lines back to us to hang on to. Fortunately we are all alone in the lock with plenty of space should we need it. As the eclusier gradually opens the paddles a waterspout forms and gives Sue a gentle shower as a torrent of water hits the bows where Sue stands grimly holding the line to stop the boat from bucking around. She hauls on her rope to take up the slack as we rise slowly skywards. I glance upwards where a sea of faces looks down from behind a restraining barrier, as tourists – cyclers and hikers mainly - stop on the towpath to gawp at this dramatic spectacle, just as we had done the previous day on our recce to check it out. Forewarned is forearmed.

Once through, we enter directly into the second lock and in turn out on to a canal bridge, similar to the Pont Canal at Briare, but this one goes over the wide course of the river Allier, again with a sheer drop on both sides. So a 3-in-1 experience but smoothly done thanks to a cheerful and experienced lockkeeper. We glide off the end of the canal bridge and back on to the Canal lateral a la Loire direction Nemours.

The day is yet young and with the bonus of a 20 kms run without locks we make good progress and to decide to bypass the turn off the link canal to Nemours and carry on towards  Decize where we will turn north on the Nivernais canal, and eventually home to St. Florentin.

But it was not to be as simple as that.

That afternoon we pull in at a pretty mooring in a little village called Fleury- sur- Loire where a Guingette tent has been erected on the wide grassy banks so we knew we could get a meal that night, and hopefully a cold beer as well.

Then the bad news. An Aussie-manned rental boat we had spoken with earlier that day came in and moored to the bank in front of us. The guy announced he had just made it through the nearby lock as the canal had been closed due to an accident further down the line. Later a VNF (Voies Navigables de France) van pulled up and announced that an accident in a lock beyond Decize had damaged the lock gates AND the masonry wall and it may take a month to repair. In the meantime 40kms of canal was closed until the damage had been surveyed and we would be updated in due course.

So near and so far- we were less than one days travel away from the turning off this canal at Decize to go north up the Nivernais which had been one of the things we had been most looking forward to as we had never travelled the lower section of the Nivernais before, and it would lead us towards home.

Not knowing how long our meagre supplies would last – surely we wouldn’t be stranded there a month?- we ate a meal at the guingette that night, worried that we would have to have some sort of plan B if that were the case.

How would I get back to the car 3 hours drive away from this remote village? I would have to leave Sue and Laddie and then come back for them, even if I could find a station and a train, with a rail strike in progress. Then what? Could we leave the boat here unguarded? But then where would we stay? Hotel or return to England?–  both expensive, but then we would have to come back again when the canal was opened. No immediate solutions came to mind.

Next morning started with worse news. Laddie and I set off on foot to explore this tiny village and find the shop and/or some bread and croissants. I spotted a local and asked the question, and -yes, you’ve guessed it- ‘en vacances monsieur! the nearest boulangerie is 5 or 6 kilometres away.’ Coco-Pops again then laddie.