To all those Americans out there- Happy Independence Day!
Haven't posted for a couple of days, so must work backwards. I last wrote about the problems we had with hooligans in Carcassonne. That was Tuesday night. We didn't get much sleep. The mobs never came back to sit in front of our boat, but they were all around and very rowdy and noisy. When you feel intimidated on the boat it is surprising to realise how insecure you are on a boat. We could lock the hatch from inside but it would be very easy to break into for anyone determined. Richard decided to put the keel down to act as an anchor in case anyone thought to let our lines off.
So we woke up to a very cool grey and miserable Wednesday. We spoke in the morning to the harbour office and they agreed to move us to an alongside berth in the main harbour. They seem to pretend that our problem was unusual, but we have now heard from a number of people that this rowdy element on the canal causes problems. The space we have been given has a boat in it for the moment so we go shopping to provision up for the next few days. I pass a shop having a sale on t-shirts and buy 6!
Back to the boat and we can see that our new berth is empty. So we break one of our rules of this trip, being never to repeat a lock. We have to go back through the lock this morning and then go down it tomorrow! But that must be preferable to a night like last night. As we go through the lock we realise that one of our ropes has been cut in the night. We have lost about 5 meters of warp. Luckily they cut the part that was not holding us on to the shore, but the extra end tied on the guard wires. Also luckily they cut our oldest warp which we rarely use, so it is not a great loss in the long run. However, in the short term it is a nuisance because it means I can't keep lines on both sides of the boat to go through locks. So again at the last minute I will find myself swapping over ropes! The new fenders have more or less solved that problem, but it raises its ugly head again with the lack of a fourth long line.
Anyway by the time we move the boat it is getting late for our posh lunch. We are eating at Le Parc Franck Putelat. It has 2 Michelin rosettes. It is on the other side of the Cite, so we take a taxi. I am in a bad mood before lunch, but the meal was divine and cheered me up. I think it is the best food we have eaten so far. We did not do the lowest priced lunch menu, but had their next up full menu. I did not keep the menu, so I can't say exactly what we ate, but we had five courses all of many flavours and lots of truffles, which for a change I could really taste. The main course was duckling cooked two ways, one just roasted and the other stuffed into a courgette flower. The desert was a feast for the eyes. It looked more like a hat designed by Philip Treacy than food! It was a fruit, cream and biscuit concoction, but as I say, lovely to look at. We spend over 2 hours over lunch and then walked back to the Cite to see the Basilica that we did not get to yesterday. We also wandered a bit around the town, but found we were tired so went back to the boat before 5pm.
I was going to make us what looked like an interesting Aubergine dish for supper, but we found that we were so full with our lunch that we could hardly manage to eat anything for supper. Just ate a very small slice of pate I bought a couple of days ago.
Then to bed for a good early start when the locks open tomorrow.
So today we got up fairly early and made it through the town lock (for the third time) just after 9:00am. We have set ourselves a hefty goal today. Richard wants to get to Agde by Sunday night and that means long days.
The day started out cool and grey again, but the sky started to clear during the morning and it turned into a very nice day. However, it was also a very frustrating day. The plan was to do 12 locks and 39km. However when we got to the first 3 chamber lock we had a huge delay. It was our sixth lock and we were hoping to get through it to make it to a port some way ahead. However when we got there we found 4 other boats waiting to get through the lock. It was a long wait because there was an enormous barge coming the other way. It took up the whole of the locks and being so large had to proceed very slowly. When it finally emerged, and the boats could go in they could not even fit the four boats in front of us into the lock, let alone us. We then had to wait for the boats going down through the three chambers and another huge barge came back up. It took over an hour before we could even enter the lock. Then our final frustration. The other boat left with us to wait for the lock was manned by an English family. It was a hire boat and they had no idea what they were doing and couldn't steer the boat at all. We decided that they better go into the lock first, that way they wouldn't hit us! That proved to be the sensible way to proceed, but because of their lack of skill it all took much longer than it would otherwise have done. Further, they went and plonked the boat in the middle of the lock leaving no room for us to go behind them. That meant we had to go to the windward side of the lock. The wind had got up a lot and we had terrible trouble getting close enough to land me and then the boat was blown off and I had to fight the wind to pull it in. This did not end at this lock. We had to go along with this other boat in this fashion for two more double locks.
By this time it was nearing 6pm and the locks shut at 7. We knew we were not going to make it to our planned stop. When we got to the penultimate lock we had wanted to do (another 2 chamber lock) he hire boat stopped at the waiting piles where they found the other boat they had been travelling with and which had got through the original delayed lock. We thought maybe they would both be stopping there for the night to let us go through, but no, they both went into the lock. There was no way we were going to do two more locks with two lots of hopeless charter crews. So we gave up. We tied up to the waiting moorings and here we are for the night. It is actually quite a pleasant stop, and hopefully we will get a good start in the morning. However, yet another charter boat has tied up to the same pontoon to do the same. Let's hope they are more competent.
Before I close, a few words about the canal. We have got to the part where the trees have been cut. We have seen some felled trees before. It seems that it is the lane trees which are affected. They seem to have some sort of die back. There are a lot of completely dead trees. Earlier in the canal they hadn't been taken down and were just marked for felling. Here we see more of the areas where they have felled the offending trees. There was one stretch which had been replanted. I noted not with plane trees. But the banks are not bare. There are a lot of other species of tree about including pines, and oaks. It is just that the planes had been planted as avenues and that is now missing in places. A shame but not nearly as bad (so far) as we were led to believe it would be.
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