Cruising with the Carters: Paris to Boissise le Bertrand

Best laid plans and all that….After Paris we intended to go back up the Marne, slowly, taking time to enjoy the places we had made note of on our way down, then head back across the Aisne a la Marne Canal and eventually amble our way along the Canal des Ardennes to the Meuse River and back into Belgium.

But… a while back when we crossed the Canal Aisne a la Marne, there was leak from the canal into the surrounding land which is lower. For weeks now they have been trying to sort out the problem but it has got worse and now the canal has been closed completely so they can make the necessary repairs. No time frame has been given (except for “as quickly as possible”) and we cannot take the chance that it will all be good to go by the time we need to cross that canal.

So last night we had a big think: what are the alternatives? Out came the maps, calculators, voyage planners, etc. One of the options is to go further south, up the Haute Seine ( or Seine Amont as it is now called) to meet up with Ian’s sister and brother-in-law on Elle. They left their boat in Auxerre over the winter and just got back yesterday. They will be heading north towards Paris so we decided to go south to meet up with them, then travel in convoy back to Paris. They will be spending a week there to watch the French Open tennis tournament but we will spend just a couple of days before heading north back to Belgium, perhaps via the St Quentin Canal (but memories of the Riqueval tunnel behind the commercial boats do not promote this argument!) or via the Canal du Nord and an excursion into the Somme River.
Decision made – we go south.

This morning, as soon as the marina office opened, we paid the marina bill, bought a map for the new waterways we would be encountering and, most important, booked a mooring for 2 nights at the end of the month.

Finally, we got underway at 10.00. Now going upstream, we are reduced to 7 kms/hr compared to the 10 kms/hr plus that we were doing when going down stream.

The Seine is big and wide. The first 20kms or so are just big city outskirts, lots of high-rise buildings and industries, but after Corbeil-Essonne it improves a lot. There is only one problem – there is nowhere to stop! We took note of a quay about 18 km from Paris where we will stop on our return journey, but that was too soon for us stop today. We hoped to find a place to stop after about 40 kms max. Nothing suitable! There are a good few small ski-boat clubs and dinghy sailing clubs but they do not offer over-night stops for cruising boats. Any quays were taken up with live-aboard barges. Almost 60 kms from Paris, and over 9 hours later we have stopped at a quay with no bollards or cleats, and right below a lock with a rather vigorous weir alongside. We have a fore mooring line and spring to a wooden post in the grass verge, a stern mooring line attached to one of Ian’s homemade special mooring gadgets to a hole in the metal pilings lining the quay, plus another to an additional fore mooring line just in case. We are rolling around like a yacht at sea.

Suffice to say I do not have the energy to edit photos and add them to the blog tonight. Maybe tomorrow, and if it doesn’t happen then you won’t have missed much anyway! That's unfair, the Seine is not unattractive, and gets better and better the further you travel from Paris.
Here are the photos: