Continuing Along the Baïse

On Saturday, 31 May we had arrived in Nérac during a spate of rainwater runoff that had closed the entire river to navigation for two days. We were unaware of the closure, since we had come directly from la Garonne and had bypassed the manned lock down from le Canal de Garonne into la Baïse where the closure is imposed for upstream-bound boats.

We moored directly below the remains of Château Henri IV; much of it had been destroyed by the anti-royal fervor following the French Revolution. All that remains of the fifteenth and sixteenth century original is a portion of one wing of the quadrangle.  

While we waited for the raging river to subside, we explored the area, Extending along the river banks for about a kilometre upstream of Nérac is a nature park, Parc de la Garenne, Among its attractions are several artesian fountains. In one of these, la fontaine de Fleurette, is a graceful sculpture of Fleurette, a maiden who wooed and won the fleeting attention of the young prince, soon to become King Henry IV. When the royal court refused her alliance with him, she threw herself into the river. 

The attendant plaque tells that she was only sixteen, he three years older. Ravished by his love, she gave her life; he gave but a day. The  word ‘flirt’ is said to derive from her brief royal tryst.

Across the river and back near the edge of town we passed the restoration of the royal bath house, its site showing the extent of the former gardens beneath the château. The elegant sixteenth century octagonal stone pavilion is now listed as an historic monument.

On Sunday afternoon the level of the water fell  to 50 centimetres on the Nérac gauge and the river was again opened to navigation. Mid-afternoon Hoop op Zegen came through town, downbound in a rush to make it to Buzet before the locks closed; Nicholas and Marise were heading back to England from there on Monday for a couple of weeks and had been trapped upriver by the floods. With the level at 50 centimetres, the current in the river was still rather strong, making the entry to the locks still rather awkward. 

We decided to wait until Monday before we continued upstream, not for river conditions, but primarily because we were almost out of diesel. We had burnt much more than usual churning against the swift currents in le Lot, la Garonne and la Baïse. Monday morning as we watched the level of the river drop, we scrambled to find a company to deliver diesel to the barge. None of the local companies offered unmarked fuel delivery. After many phone calls with the assistance of the tour boat skipper and Capitain de Port we contacted a company to come with agricultural diesel. We decided it was an emergency and took on 200 litres of marked fuel at €0.94 per litre, about 45 cents per litre less expensive than transportation diesel. Besides the emergency, we justified the act by considering we had burnt well over 200 litres for heating and hot water during our year in France, and GNR, marked fuel is legal for those purposes.  

It was 1540 by the time we finished fueling and were able to continue upriver. As we passed the gauge on Pont Neuf, it was registering slightly below 40 centimetres, 10 centimetres below flood closure level. 

We continued along a winding and narrowing river with even narrower leads to the locks. From Nérac, we passed through seven locks.  The first two were rather easy, but from the third lock onward there are narrow and very shallow bypass canals upstream from the locks. We dragged our skeg through the soft bottom as we pumped our way along at turns for six but making two or less.

At 1902 we secured to bollards on a stone wall beneath the bridge in Moncrabeau. The town is famous as the liars’ capital of the world, but whether they are telling the truth about this, we didn’t find out. 

We left early on Tuesday morning and motored another eleven kilometres up the river, passing through three more locks to arrive in the city of Condom. We continued on through without stopping, not that we weren’t interested, but we had decided to stop there on our way back down. 

A kilometre and a half beyond Condom we secured at 1145 to the wooden wharf just upstream of Écluse Gauge. The chart book shows a supermarket 600 or 700 metres along a road above the lock, so we scurried to get there and do our fresh provisioning before all of France shut down for lunch.  

We returned to Zonder Zorg with a fine selection of fresh fruit and vegetables, meat and fish bread and pastries and, of course cheese. We are constantly reminded of the stupidity of the Canadian dairy marketing board that rewards a few farmers by making Canadians pay nearly three times the world price for cheese and other dairy products. For less than €16 we bought a selection of cheese that would have cost $75 or more in Canada.

The next lock along is a double one and it is operated by éclusiers. We arrived and tooted the horn as the sign requires and immediately two éclusiers came running. We were confused, we hadn’t previously seen any pace above a slow saunter among the lock employees. As we approached, we saw two very fit young men, obviously eager to serve us and most likely freshly arrived for summer employment. 

The lock has been kept totally manual; we watched as they cranked closed the doors and dropped the sluices.   

They than ran up the stone staircase to the central doors and began opening the sluices to flood our chamber. By the end of the summer they will either have slowed down to the snail’s pace of the standard French worker, or they well be very fit and extremely satisfied. 

The next lock, Écluse Flaran, is 3.3 metres high and has a 2 metre flood wall above the full chamber, making it a long climb to the rim to push the button to trigger the cycle. 

At 1450 we arrived in the basin at Valence-sur-Baïse, the end of the navigable portion of the river. Alongside were two small cruisers in long-term storage and two rental boats waiting for clients. 

After we had secured we walked up the steep  hill beneath the cliffs on which the walls of the fortified town were built in 1274. It was mid-afternoon and the town was nearly deserted. All the shops were closed, most of them permanently. We paused at la Mairie and its tourist information office, where we found a very talkative woman. She told us of the new supermarket and other shops a kilometre and a half outside the town and of the declining population and dying businesses in the old town. Of the remaining businesses, they open only for a few scattered hours a few days of the week  

Beside Town Hall is a Romanesque church, which was begun when the town was fortified and it was completed and dedicated in 1303. 

The interior is simple and graceful with beautifully rendered reliefs and sculptures in wood and marble backing the main altar. 

Late on Wednesday morning we headed back down the river, passing through two single locks and one double in the ten kilometres to Condom. We  secured in the basin in the centre of town exactly two hours after leaving Valence. Condom is the capital of the Armagnac region, Armagnac being with Cognac, one of the two great brandy regions of France.

The city is also famous as the home of d’Artignan et les trois mousquetaires. A newly erected sculpture of Artagnan and the Musketeers stands next to the cathedral.

Also beside the cathedral are the wonderful  sixteenth century cloisters. These are now a public space and above them are the offices of la Mairie. 

Cathédrale Saint-Pierre dates from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries built on foundations of an eleventh century abbey church. It has superb gothic vaulting in its nave.  

Among the more impressive aspects of the interior is the intricately carved masonry in the new choir, which dates to 1844.

At 1115 on Thursday we slipped and continued downriver. The water level was down and we dragged our skeg through the ooze of the bottom in the canals leading past the weirs to the locks. Some of these narrow canals are short, but a few of them are near 500 metres long; progress was painfully slow. Above Écluse Lapierre we came upon a work barge poised across the river clearing a fallen tree. We waited while it swung itself out of the way and then we passed. 

After we had pumped our way along the shallow canal leading to Écluse Lapierre, our bows were just entering the open lock doors when they began to close. A woman from an upbound rental boat had scurried up to the lock activation button and without looking, pressed it. The system shut down. 

I backed clear of the doors and dropped the  spud pole, then I phoned the number listed in the guide to report the incident and received the familiar response: “J’arrive”. About thirty minutes later the work barge that we had passed upstream arrived astern of us and put its bow into the bank to land two workers to reset the system.   

It took another quarter hour for the men to sort out the reset before we were able to enter and lock down. Finally, nearly an hour after we had begun entering the lock, we made it through. The rental boat had to wait for the lock to cycle back up to bring the work boat down before it could continue, so it was delayed nearly an hour and a half for not spending two or three seconds to see if it was clear to push the button. At 1659 we arrived in Nérac.  

After a trip to the supermarket to restock, we continued downstream at 1045 on Friday.  

The water level was still a bit high, though dramatically below the levels we had been in on our ascent the previous week. 

The landing pier that had been nearly awash was now a good 30 centimetres above water, though the buoys showed there was still a strong current running below the weirs.

At 1325 we passed under the aqueduct of  Canal de Garonne.

Four kilometres later we passed the sign indicating the junction with the canal. 

A short while later we were at the entrance to the double lock waiting to be taken up out of the Baïse and at 1428 we entered le Canal de Garonne. We had spent just short of three weeks on three rivers: la Garonne, le Lot and la Baïse. Much of this time was in unstable rainy weather and we had been in high water and in flood closures. It was good to be back in the more stable and predictable canal.

Up the Baïse

All of France had shut down on Thursday, 29 May as we celebrated Edi’s birthday. Not only were all the shops closed, but also taking the day off were the operators of the lock that would take us down to la Garonne, the pilots that would guide us up the river and the operators of the lock out of la Garonne and into la Baïse. While we waited and celebrated, it rained and the river rose. On Wednesday afternoon we had organized to do the transit to la Baïse at 1000 on Friday, when the lock operators and pilots weren’t joining the many in France taking the day off to bridge to the weekend.

We were just beginning our first cup of espresso on Friday morning when there was a knock on the hull. The pilots told us la Garonne was rising rapidly and is being closed to navigation. They could take us through if we left immediately. We quickly dressed and headed down through Écluse Aiguillon. 

We followed the narrow winding canal that bypasses the final rapids on le Lot, passing along the way an interesting assortment of fishing spots.

With all the urgency that had been expressed by the pilots, we were surprised to see that the lock had not been prepared for our arrival. We sat in the approaches for nearly a quarter hour as the lock chamber was slowly filled.

Our first glimpse of la Garonne through the opening gates showed a swirl of turbulence near the exit from the lock, and beyond that the river was moving rather uniformly past. When the pilot came aboard, he said the river was running about twelve kilometres per hour with a swifter section through le Passage de Monluc. Zonder Zorg’s theoretical hull speed is 17.5 kilometres per hour and I doubt that her 64 kilowatts of power could get her much past 17. This meant that at full power, the 4.8 kilometre passage up to the entrance to la Baïse could take an hour or more.

We headed out into the river and turned upstream to follow the pilot boat through the chocolate-brown water.

At 2500 rpm we were making a big wake in the water, but the river bank seemed to be barely moving past. We ground past buoys tugging at their mooring chains and in le Passage de Monluc, they seemed to pause beside us as we worked over the ledges. 

We watched as Pont St-Léger slowly grew and we finally reached the turbulent “lee” at the entrance to la Baïse at Écluse St-Léger. It had taken us an hour and eleven minutes; we had averaged 4.06 kilometres per hour at 2500 rpm. We could see much of the brown in the river was coming from la Baïse.

We locked through into la Baïse and started up a more placid river. The water here was even more muddy than in la Garonne, indicating a heavy runoff upstream.

The placidity of the river gradually changed as we approached Écluse Buzet, four and a half kilometres upstream. During the last kilometre before the lock we ran through increasing foam and turbulence and as we approached the weir we saw water flowing high over it. The wall beneath the weir that separates the spillway current from the lock entrance was nearly awash.

From the top of the lock chamber we had a good look at the turbulence and the source of the foam through which we had been motoring.

At 1240 we paused on the stone quai a short distance upstream of the weir, just below Pont de Buzet. We were hungry, having had our breakfast plans cancelled by the early arrival of the pilots. 

After enjoying a late brunch, we continued up la Baïse, passing the lock that leads up to le Canal de Garonne.

Four kilometres further along we passed under the canal as the skies attempted to clear.

The speed and turbulence of the river increased as we approached Écluse Vianne. The river was up with water flowing over the separating wall between the weir outflow and the lock entrance. The top of an abutment, a directional sign and some navigation beacons were all that slowed the water in the approaches to the lock.

I dropped Edi off on the finger below the closed lock gates and then sat in the turbulence on the bollards as she set the mechanism in motion to cycle the lock down for us. The back eddy below the lock doors made it a tad tricky entering the chamber, but our fenders were well placed and up to their assigned tasks. 

From below the lock we had seen open mooring spaces along the quai in Vianne, so once we had locked through, we secured to the solid concrete wharf and called it a  day. We had left the fast-moving Lot, ascended the faster moving Garonne and started our way up the raging Baïse. It was 1440, so we walked up into the town for fresh provisions. The only thing the town has going for itself is that its thirteenth century bastide walls are still standing. Inside it is nearly dead with most of the businesses closed. Of the two groceries, one was closed and the other may as well have been. Its shelves were near bare and its sparse produce selection was approaching compost. We selected an overpriced basket of strawberries with the fewest culls.

At 0850 on Saturday we slipped our lines and continued up the river. The level had risen overnight and the current was noticeably stronger.

Three kilometres along and around two sharp bends, we approached Écluse Lavardac, where there was a large churn of turbulence and spume the few hundred metres leading to the lock. I dropped Edi off on a two-metre wooden wharf sited in the middle of the eddies below the weir.

I dropped the spud pole and sat in the churn with a stern line to a bollard on the tiny quai, while Edi activated the lock.

Edi’s view from the lock made the conditions on the water appear much more sever than they seemed from onboard.

In the lock we found a continuation of the broken and dysfunctional systems. Missing bollards, badly placed bollards, broken bollards and other shortcomings do not allow a relaxation in the chambers, but force a constant adaptation and improvisation. The only predictable thing with the systems is that each lock will be differently setup and different things will be broken.

At the next lock, the landing wharf was nearly awash, its upstream end covered in foam. I stemmed the current and juggled with the eddies to land Edi so she could head up to the lock to activate the cycle.

The turbulence at the lock entrance made threading Zonder Zorg into the chamber a bit more exacting than normal. This was further complicated by the locks above Lavardac being only 4.15 metres wide, rather than the 5 metres on le Lot and the 6 metres on Canal de Garonne. This narrower width left us with just a couple of centimetres clearance on each side of our leeboard fenders.

We continued working our way upstream against the heavy current and erratic turbulence.

We arrived at Écluse Nérac after nearly three hours of very hard slogging against adverse conditions. We decided to stop for the day once we had cleared through the lock.

A few minutes before noon we secured to rings on the stone wall in Nérac. We were greeted with information that because of the flood conditions, the river had been closed to navigation for two days and would likely remain closed for another couple. We hadn't been informed of the closure because that happens on the way upstream only at the lock descending into la Baïse from Buzet. We decided to pause a bit longer.