Weeeed!!..Canal entre Champagne et Bourgogne

Weed is the big sunflower that sits in between Bill and Ben's flowerpots at the bottom of the garden. She takes care of Bill and Ben and is gentle, kind and can be a bit of a worrier.

I used to love Bill and Ben, and we've taken to saying 'weeeeed' to each other rather alot along this stretch of the journey!

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The Canal entre Champagne et Bourgogne runs from Vitry-le-Francois up to the summit level at the Balesmes Tunnel and then descends down to joing the River Saone at Huilly-sur-Saone. There is very little commercial traffic and it much narrower than the previous waterways we have travelled. We have also been warned aboutthe 'weeeed' and warned that heavy weed can break the surface of the water leaving just a narrow, propeller-strimmed channel down the centre. Large amounts of weed can collect around rudders and keel , block filters and toilet systems!

There is also a stretch known as 'the green desert' where facilities and shops are few and far between.

So lots to look forward to!

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Vitry-le-Francois was an important waterways crossway and has been associated with barge people.

This picture is taken beside the canal and is where there was a boatyard specialisig in the maintenance and repair of steel boats, sadly it has closed down this year.

The canal opened in its entire lengthin 1907 allowing traffic as far as the Seine. Thanks to the presence of iron factories in the northern Haute-Marne , commercial traffic remained active until the beginning of the second world war. It has since declined and is now promoted as a more tourisitc waterway, though we were still rarely seeing other boats, and had many days without seeing another boat at all.

There are 114 locks, 2 tunnels, ten aquaducts and 17 lifting bridges , testament to the engineers posted here at the end of the 19th century.

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We left Vitry in time to pick up a remote control from the first lock , however there was already another large yacht in the lock, something we were not used to seeing. Also we didn't recognise it from previous days and were suprised it had reached the lock before us. Then we realised that another canal joined at Vitry, the Canal de la Marne au Rhin.

It was a bit of a wait for them to pass through, the collection of the remote requires registering over the phone in the wall with central command and then a little drawer opening to give the remote to us.

This all seemed to go without a problem, my French by now was becoming much better.

I previously wrote about a pizza machine, I realise now that it was at Orconte which we reached at lunchtime and ate said pizza!

We hadn't been too sure as to how far we would go today, as there were many more frequent locks on this canal and it generally takes at least twenty minutes to pass through a lock. There are factors also affecting this.

There may already be a boat in the lock, ascending or descending , which obviously then affects wether or not it is ready to enter, and sometimes the lock just doesn't work neccessitating a call to VHF to fix. This they may do remotely, or they may need to send someone out, and the wait ,we discovered, could be anything from a moment to two hours, they never let on as to how long it would be !

Today Sprocket and I decided to cycle along, this meant we could prepare the lock ahead of Ramukanji's arrival. These locks were also quite deep and placing the lines on bow and stern from the boat was tricky and time consuming, whereas with myself on the lock side already it was easy for Mike to throw the ropes up for me to wrap around the bollards.

The towpath seems to be tarmac for the length of the canal, and thus very easy to cycle along. The weather for this section was generally wet with sunny intervals, and actually quite good for Sprocket and I to cycle long distances. When reaching these signs we would press the button on the remote control to alert the lock of our approach. Generally, the lock would need to empty itself before the doors opening and this would take about fifteen minutes.

If the verge was overgrown we had to cycle a bit nearer to the lock so that the remote control would work.

The reote also controls the filling and emptying by button, so much easier to position the boat in the lock not having to be near the twisty poles!

So it was that we managed to reach St, Dizier having ascended fourteen locks just before they closed for the evening.

We moored up on a smart and modern town quay , nothing to pay and collected the water and electricity tokenes from the cinema (bizarre!) who were really friendly and welcoming.

The following day was not so easy!

On leaving St Dizier we encountered our first lifting bridge, except that it didn't lift!

These are also worked using the remote control, and although the red and green lights appeared, nothing else happened.

A call to VNF and I was told that it would be fixed, but no timescale given! So we bobbed about for about an hour, not too easy as there was nowhere to moor and we were beginning to see ....'weeeeed'!

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The trouble with the weed was that it slowed us down, a lot!

It isn't like weed we would recognise but looks like a triffid, on speed.

It wraps around the keel and the prop and just gets in the way. So far we haven't had too much of a problem but today it was clogging us especially as we were waiting for so long and so having to come out of the central channel and thus enter into the weed areas.

Mike had fitted a prop blade in the hope that this would prevent too much problem and it seemed to be working.

The locks seemed to be where it collected, and often this would be cause for the lock to not work properly as it would get trapped in the mechanisms, or sometimes be so much that it would prevent a door closing fully. The lock keepers do their best to remove it but it eems to be a never ending task!

The VNF who are responsible for the waterways are developing systems to try to prevent the spread of the invasive weeds.

The system aims to compete with the plant and weaken it by consuming the nutrients present in the sediments and the water column such as nitrogen and phosphorus for example. The latter no longer having the nutrients necessary for its development sees its proliferation limited or even reduced.

Let's hope there is some success, as the invasion of waterways in Europe by foreign weed species is a real threat to their ecodiversitiy.

Our journey progressed through the lovely countryside, however another lock fault with over an hours wait to fix, left us wanting to stop for the night and we had decided on a stop at Chevillon.

Unfortunately, though a lovely stop, there were no bollards and we still hadn't been able to acquire any stakes in France. We managed to find one stake burried in the grass and tied another rope to a sign, which seemed to work well and wasn't causing an obstruction. The other problem was that the canal seemed to be a lot lower than the boat, so we had to rig up a solution for getting on and off using good old 'Matt' and a bit of rope!

A well earned drink in the local (open) bar, before a quiet night by ourselves again 😊