Fontainebleau onwards—says Jeeves !!!

Sat 11th Well here we are, on our own and taking it slowly,.

Hardly any boats around, ..we keep expecting it all to be busier.

Locks open at 0900, and all close between 1200 and 1300 hrs for lunch and finish at 1900hrs. Nobody is in a hurry, and lunches are to be enjoyed.

All locks now on the Canal du Loing are manually operated  by mainly young women students so Max is off the boat helping them manually wind the locks…he needs the exercise anyway.

And very occasionally I am allowed to drive the boat…with a very nervous bad passenger.

 

Monday 13th.

So complacency sets in and yesterday our bow-thruster decided to pack a sad. Not that on this lovely small canal, with no commercial barges and banks that you can stop at anytime..,its much of a problem, but later on, on the rivers Max would really like to have it.

A English man from a yacht moored by us gave us some numbers of yards to call within a 50km radius but no luck.. either busy for at least a week or they didn’t do call outs. So its off on our bikes to Montargis, 6 kms away to talk to the Captainairie there. No luck, only a phone set on answer mode.

What is so amazing about France is the Tourist offices in the small towns. They are so helpful and try their best to understand our bad French and with their variable English we manage quite well. We spent 2 hours with her phoning everybody from the Police to numbers off the internet. Finally she got hold of a guy called Simon Evans ( who we already knew about) but is 60 kms away. He is an Brit guy who runs a boat yard at Migennes, (on the River Yonne), who we had contacted a few weeks ago about wintering our boat… (its a small world).

Max prepares himself with rubber gloves, shoes and terry’s t-shirt,,, and descends into the water and found he could stand up in the canal, !!,  proving life jackets won’t save you here. !!!

He found that the propeller wasn’t jammed, so we know its the motor. (shit, more $$$$$)

 

Anyway Simon will come out to us hopefully on Weds and sort us out. I have to say people here are helpful but its not cheap owning a boat. !!!

So we are going to take the next few days motoring slowly down to Braire and wait for Simon.