Rangali Adventures: Rully to Fragnes/Fragnes to St Jean de Losne

Tuesday 17^th June

Rully to Fragnes

8 locks and 8.5km

We left Rully at 9am, our first lock was just around the corner, which was followed in fairly quick succession 7 more locks, through beautiful countryside with views looking back towards Rully.

At lock 31, the lights were red, a boat was coming up so to save floating around we decided to moor up on some large white bollards, which looked suitable for very a large barge bigger than us. Unfortunately we ended up with the bow temporarily grounded on a hidden rock! We had to back off, and luckily floated free with a big sigh of relief.

We arrived at Fragnes at 12.20pm, there are lots of places to moor with water and electric. Suzie and Ulick on Quercy were already moored up, they had arrived a couple of days earlier, so we were able to catch up on each other’s news.

As we had arrived at lunchtime Kev and I went to the restaurant at the port, it’s a great restaurant, we highly recommend it.

In the afternoon we cycled to Chalon-sur-Saône, we made the mistake of not cycling back to the lock we had come through to cross the bridge to the other side of the canal, which is a cycle route into Chalon. Instead we cycled on the track on our side of the canal to find the track ran out and we had to cycle on the main road, through an industrial estate with articulated lorries overtaking us. Kev was very annoyed with me for taking this route, for those of you who know him, you'll know what this is like!! There was a mention of our bikes being thrown into the canal but he did calm down and we still have our bikes! We eventually got to the town centre feeling hot and grubby. We took a look at the river Saône, it’s a lovely, wide, gentle flowing river. We saw two huge hotel boats moored at Chalon, we hoped we wouldn’t see them on our travels up the river on Thursday.

Suzie and Ulick kindly invited us for drinks in the evening, such a shame they are selling Quercy as they are great fun. Quercy is looking immaculate, as they had finished painting the roof back up on the summit of the canal. Quercy certainly doesn’t look 5 years old, I am sure they will sell her very quickly with H2O at St Jean de Losne.

Fabulous countryside and views on this section of the Canal du Centre

A huge Hotel Cruiser mooored at Chalon sur Saône

Wednesday 18^th June

Fragnes

Kev and I spent the day on the boat, the morning was spent washing, ironing, cleaning and general boating maintenance. As the day progressed, more and more boats arrived, it got really crowded and even two big hotel boats moored up. One of the hotel barges was Caprice, now on its way back up the Canal du Centre. Peppa with Peter and Pauline arrived and they squeezed expertly in front of Rangali while we were having another great lunch at the restaurant.

We found out that there were at least four barges leaving first thing Thursday morning, destination St Jean de Losne, Quercy, Peppa, Celine and us. There were also loads of hire boats that we thought would be going to Chalon. We all wanted to get through the last lock on the canal as soon as it opened at 9am so tomorrow morning was going to be interesting. Also it was going to be fun trying to find somewhere to moor at St Jean as we would all be arriving quite late and all the quayside moorings would no doubt be gone.

We rang Blanquarts who have moorings at St Jean, they said their port was full at St Jean, but we could moor along side some barges if we entered the canal de Bourgogne, we weren’t sure we’d arrive before the lock closed but we thought we could keep it in mind as a possible option.

In the evening Suzie and Ulick came to ours for drinks, and we had a fun time.

Thursday 19^th June
Fragnes to St Jean de Losne

4 locks and 68km

We woke up early, Barge Celine and Peppa set off at around 7.15am, to get first in the queue for the lock so at 7.30m we decided to go too, we told Quercy and we motored slowly to the first lock together. We arrived at the lock just after 8am. There was plenty of space to moor up. The lock keeper arrived early and Celine and another smaller boat went down first, followed by Peppa and Quercy, then us with a hire boat that had just arrived. The lock is around 11m deep, with floating bollards, and it goes down very gently. We left the lock by 9.50am and we joined the river Saône 10 minutes later. It is such a dramatic difference being on the wide river after being on a narrow, fairly shallow canals for the past 2 ½ months. We never did catch up the other barges, we arrived at the first big lock on the Saône and saw them already going up, so we had to wait for it to empty again for us to enter.

We only had two huge river locks to contend with, it all went fine, and we saw a few large commercial barges on the river, but we had an easy, but tiring journey, arriving at St Jean just before 5pm. The river is beautiful, very easy to navigate and the weather was perfect.

We had our VHF radio on channel 10 to make sure we could hear any ship to ship conversations. When we were getting close to St Jean, we heard over the VHF that Peppa and Celine were struggling to get a mooring on the river. So we telephoned Blanquarts again to see if there was still space for us on the canal de Bourgogne, there was, so we then rang the lock keeper to ask him to prepare the lock as we were about 10 minutes away. We came through our last lock of the day and moored alongside a barge that was moored alongside two other barges. It’s a bit of a scramble to get off the boat climbing over three other barges but at least we have a safe berth. Peppa and Celine, came through the lock after us as they weren’t successful in mooring up on the river and they went on a bit further along the canal to moor up.

We are moored up with loads of boats of different shapes and sizes, most of them are having work done on them, there are two boat yards here, with two very good chandleries. They sell all the canal guidebooks, and we even saw the guides for sale in a newsagent in the town. St Jean de Losne is a big boating centre and a crossroads of two canals (the Canal de Bourgogne, the canal de Rhône au Rhin) and and the river Saône is a major route.

We have decided to change our route to Strasbourg and go via the Canal Rhône au Rhin. We will be completing a big circle and returning to St Jean we think by the end of August to travel along the canal de Bourgogne to our winter mooring at Migennes. We are waiting for a package to arrive at the post office, it wasn’t there when we went this morning, so hopefully it will be there tomorrow.