A modest start to our marathon, after shopping at a supermarket only five minutes from the port, which was certainly a benefit. We found ourselves getting back into the swing of small, freycinet-gauge canal locks after all the enormous commercial ones on the big rivers. To explain freycinet-guage: in the 19th century France had a visionary transport minister, M. Freycinet, who decreed that all locks on all canals should be able to take a barge of 38 x 5 metres. And that is the Freycinet gauge. It meant that the French canals remained commercially viable up to the 1960s, and there are still quite a few barges of this size plying their trade today – though not on the Canal de Bourgogne. The only ones we expect to encounter will have been converted into luxury floating hotels for wealthy tourists.
Of course, being France, there was plenty of weed and other debris in the water – we even saw someone using a leaf blower to blow grass cuttings into the water and doubtless straight into our fresh water strainer. That had to be emptied several times during the day.
On a brighter note, we were intrigued to pass an English narrow boat moored up. I wonder if she came across the channel by sea, or on the back of a lorry.
To begin with the canal is long and straight, with little traffic:
The locks were quite deep – more than three metres. But in general the student lock-keepers were helpful, though some had to look after two locks, so there were delays.
After lunch, we fell in with some charming New Zealanders on a hire boat, waiting to negotiate the first lock of their holiday. So we volunteered to go in front – not somewhere we really like to be. However, all went well.
Some lock-keepers were more communicative than others. This chap fell into the latter category:
The canal passes through farming country, and the harvest is in, with bales of straw everywhere.
Heading for six o'clock we decided we had done enough for our first day on the canal, and found a shady spot to moor up just below tomorrow's first lock.
We should get beyond Tonnerre tomorrow, and maybe to Tanlay, but much depends on how efficiently the locks work.
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