Saturday 10th June 2017 Villegusien to Champigny-les-Langres 17.5kms 10 locks 1 tunnel

View from lock 6 Descente en Saône

9.8°C Sunny, hot. A loaded boat went past heading uphill at 7.30am. The Windows 10 download had finished, just hope a new installation will put my laptop right (it didn’t). We were in the shade of the silo first thing so it was cool when we set off at 9am. I did two loads of washing as there should be water available where we’re stopping. A Swedish yacht went past heading downhill. The eight locks to the summit were linked and each one was 5m deep.

View down the flight from lock 1 Descente en Saône

Cattle country, smelly. The first lock 8, Percey was the only one with a name the rest were just called Descente en Saône. Lock 7’s house had been empty for a long time. A friendly lady jogger went past us, running downhill as we went up lock 6 (which had no house now) I took a photo looking back across the Plateau de Langres to the wind farm on a ridge of low hills. Our friendly lady jogger went past running uphill now, waving and wishing us bonne route. Lock 5 had a lived

Lock 1 and the checkpoint at Heuilly-Coton

in house and 4 had no house, but it had bins – at last we can dump our accumulation of rubbish. Lock 3’s house was lived in, lock 2 had no house and the top lock had a house used by VNF and workshops. There was a modern building for the controller alongside the lock and the dark-haired young man came out to tell us the current situation in Balesmes tunnel. One boat was coming through, then the péniche in front of us would go first and we must wait for a green light before following him through the 4,820m long tunnel. On to the 10kms long summit level, altitude 340m. A Dutch cruiser came out of the tunnel and the boat in front of us, Athena, a loaded péniche from Nieuwe Amsterdam, (the boat that went past us this morning at 7.30am – we should have realised just how slow this trip was going to be!) untied and went off to the tunnel through the long narrow entrance section, slowly. We waited ages for our green light and a light display said OK for No. 242 to go (the number of our zapper box). There were dozens of yellow floating buoys marking the channel into the narrows, (Mike took a photo of a Willy-wagtail on

Control centre by lock 1

one) then a barrier and height restriction gauge. It was 12.05pm as we set off into the narrows before the tunnel and 12.30pm as we passed a string of hazard signs and went into the tunnel. There were traffic lights in the centre of the roof, a narrow towpath with lights and emergency communications posts on our left and twin ventilator fans in the roof with a flashing yellow light. The traffic lights made sure we kept between 800m and 1200m behind the boat in front – and it was going very, very slowly. We had to keep stopping as the automatic system kept three red lights on between us and the péniche. It was the slowest we had ever been through a tunnel and that includes the tug tow through Riqueval. We had some lunch – at least it was cool in the tunnel. The last few hundred kilometres were wet, water dripping down the walls and off the roof leaving calcite deposits and spraying through the thin cotton of our battered old sunshade. It was 2.20pm when we finally emerged into the sunshine again. 1 hour 50 minutes. A record. Into the long narrow section through a cutting, where there were lengths of cut timber leaning against the cutting wall for péniches to use to hang over their hulls as fendering when passing through the tunnel. Through

VNF depot by lock 1 and two very old boats

the barrier and height restriction gauge and into the wider canal again. There were six new péniche moorings for waiting for the tunnel going south. A couple were fishing by the feed from the infant river Marne near a long-derelict house for the VNF man who looked after the feed. 71 locks downhill to Vitry - in the Paris basin now - and the loaded péniche hadn’t got to the first lock yet. Eventually it went through and we zapped and lock 1 Batailles (3.90m) filled and we

Peniche mooring, lights and sign board for Balesmes tunnel

went down. There was a man on the lockside by a lived in house who was taking photos. 2.6kms to the next. A German couple were sat out on the stern of their cruiser from Hamburg, moored next to a concrete quay by a bridge which carried a track over the canal. We waited, the boat in front wasn’t in the lock yet. Lock 2 Moulin Chapeau (3.60m) had an inhabited lock house. A short distance after the lock we tied up at the long quay in Champigny-les-Langres behind a

Willy-wagtail on a channel marker buoy

UK catamaran. It was 4.45pm. In front of a new-build DB beyond the sailing boat, the péniche was reversing into a gap on the quay. It got a line from its stern to the bank and remained there with its bows in the middle, a gangplank to the bank, and stayed there overnight. A group of young people (students?) were sitting on the grass under a tree by our stern and having a picnic, they stayed there until after dark. I tried doing all the repairs suggested on my laptop and

Balesmes tunnel green light to enter south end. The next three lights are red.
The fourth is green for the peniche. The lights are 400m apart.

nothing worked. I know from previous experience that it will take ages to get my laptop working again as it will have to go back to factory settings, then I’ll have to re-download all my programmes. Mike took the hard drive out of my HP and I transferred all my files to his Acer laptop to a file for safe-keeping on its desktop, which took hours.

Peniche moored at Champigny

 

One of the many emergency intercoms in the tunnel

Leaving north end of tunnel

Moored at Champigny