Locks and Bridges

Picture 1: Unnamed bascule bridge
Picture 2: Mike cranking open one side of a lock
Picture 3. Lock opening for us
Picture 4: Carolyn Stamps and I at the Bourgagne (Burgundy) Canal in Migenes.

We picked up our canal boat in the small village of Migennes, about 100 miles SSE of Paris. It is on the Burgundy Canal at the junction of the Yonne River and the Nivernais Canal. Perhaps you can follow this itinerary on Google maps.

The Yonne River is 192 km long and empties into the left bank of the Siene. It starts in the Nievre department in the Morvan hills near the town of Chateau-Chinon and gives its name to the Yonne department of the region of Burgundy. It was the primary traffic route to move wine and timber to Paris using tow barges during the 19th Century, similar to the U.S. Eire Canal. it is shadowed by the Nivernais Canal. Boat traffic locks into the canal wherever the river is too shallow, rapid or curvy. The canal and river are no longer navigable to commercial traffic above the town of Auxerre because the locks are too short, narrow and shallow. But the French government maintains them very nicely for pleasure traffic.

We locked out of the Bourguigne Canal into the Yonne River on Monday, Sept 6. This was our deepest lock at 10 ft. It is a little nerve wracking to be standing on the bow of your boat and looking over the water in front of you to a 10 foot drop. Kind of like being on the Black Pearl as it goes over the edge of the world.

We headed down river to the town of Joigny the first day and spent the night in a marina. It cost 5 Euros, about $7.50. Water was free and electricity was included. Sure beats the cost of cruising in the U.S. Most of the towns we stayed at deserve their own post so I won't go into them now. The second day our we reversed course and headed upriver. Stops included Gurgy, Auxerre, Bailly, Vincelles, Cravant, a riverside tie up on a meadow near Mailly-la-Ville, the rock formations at Saussions, Coulanges-sur-Yonne, Clamecy, back down river to Coulanges-sur-Yonne, and finally Chatel-Censoir where we turned the boat in on Sept 16. See the picture above.

Auxerre is the biggest city in the region at 35,000 plus. This is not a heavily populated area. In fact, most of it was country. Auxerre was founded in 900 AD by Saint Nicholas, I think. I will check on the founding guy. It is a beautiful city and worth its own post. I have a number of great pictures and will share a few. In fact, I have pictures of most of those medieval towns and will post them soon. Most are built on hills and my knees have yet to recover.

We lost count of how many locks we went through. It was around 50 during the 8 days of travel. Courtesy suggests a boat member help the lock master/mistress if possible. When going upstream this requires one crew member to jump onto a slippery ladder and climb the to the top of the lock, retrieve lines from persons on the bow and stern, wrap them around a bollard, toss the lines back, and then go crank one side of the lock gates. Going downstream it require the assisting person to climb back down the ladder and step onto the moving boat. The boat driver needs to be pretty good. Needless to say we "girls" left that part to the more nibble "boys" while we controlled the lines.

At one point, in some nameless hamlet we came to a bascule bridge. It was clearly marked, in French, that only authorized persons were allowed to operate the bridge. Since no authorized person showed up we had to operate it ourselves, both going upstream and back down. The local traffic thanked us for being hasty in our transit.

Coming next: Eating in Burgundy, Flowers everywhere, and all those medieval cities.