Friday 16 August 2013

Lagny-sur-Marne to Paris!


Thursday 15th August

The mooring at Lagny was great, a good pontoon, electric and water for only 6 euros.  We didn’t find a lot of choice for restaurants, but maybe we didn’t look in the right place.  Also, as we have found everywhere, lots of shops closed for their summer break, so no shopping for Debbie!

At 8.30am we left Lagny, we just missed getting out in front of a large commercial heading down stream, not a problem as these empty commercial barges go much faster than us on the river section, but we joined a 9km section of canal.  The commercials go much slower in the canals, not enough water for them.  So we ended up going down from 5.2kts on the river to 2.2kts (about half the speed we find we do on the canals).  It felt like we were on tick over.   We also got stuck in a traffic jam of commercials, and we had to wait at Lock 16 at Neilly for two commercials to go down so the 9km section took us 1.5 hours.

At 2.45pm we joined the Seine for the short 3km journey to Port du Arsenal.  It was all very easy on this short section of the river.  As we went under Pont Du Berry about 1km away from Port du Arsenal we made contact by VHF radio to the lock that you go through to enter the port, we were told in 10 minutes the lock would be ready for us, so by 3.44pm we were tied up.  Its an amazing feeling to know you are in the middle of Paris and that you have made it here under your own steam from London!  We have travelled 550km since we left Dunkerque in 15 days of travel.  We had some long days, not intentional because its been hard to find a mooring, but we didn’t mind as it meant we could make Paris before going south up the Seine past the locks due to close at the end of August.

We are staying here three nights its 75 euros a night for us with water and electric.  Just for general info, the office at the Port du Arsenal sell the whole range of Fluvial guides.  We hadn’t got the guide Seine Amont no.2 as we didn’t think we were doing The Seine south of Paris.  So that saves searching Paris today!

 
Leaving Lagny-sur-Marne
Traffic jam.  This is actually two peniche coming towards us,
one empty, one full and we are following a full Peniche






Paris arriving by river, looks scary but it isn't



Entrance to Port du Arsenal


In the lock for the port






Our mooring...hows that for a tight squeeze!






Paris by night, very warm evening, lots of Parisians picnicking 

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