Down the Mosel River

On Monday the weather was rainy and windy. So we stayed put in our lovely mooring on the Saar River with just cliffs for company. No TV either as the satellite was cut off by the cliffs. Still the next morning dawned much brighter and we walked along the river to the town of Mettlach where we visited the Villeroy and Boch factory shop. Their worldwide headquarters are based there though much of their manufacturing takes place all over the country. Then down the river we sailed passed more magnificent cliffs.

We stopped for lunch at the pretty town of Saarburg. A small stream flows through the town and then over a waterfall and into the Saar River.

 

Restaurants cluster along the stream and tourists crowd the restaurants and everyone seems happy though we just bought some bread and ham and ate lunch on our boat with the Saar for company and the sun on our backs.

Then on downstream with the cliffs slowly diminishing until at last we turned a corner and there we were on the River Mosel  (Moselle in French). Wide and slow flowing and suddenly lots of barges in all directions. We stopped about 1km downstream at the town on Konz from which we visited the city of  Trier by train. For all its size and importance as the old Roman capital of Germany, it has no facilities for small boats. Still the train station of Konz is only a 5 minute walk from the boat and within 10 minutes of boarding the train we were in the middle of Trier where our first stop was the 2000 year old Porta Nigra (or Black Gate) that still dominates the town after all these years.

 

Almost in as good a condition as the day it was born. A mighty entrance to the town it would have seemed in those far off days. We walked over to the Basilica which was once Emperor Constantine’s throne room. A vast  building made of brick (you can see it in the photograph below to the left at the back of the much later palace of the bishops).

There are lots of other Roman ruins all around Trier but we left it there and caught the train back to the boat and next day headed further North and downstream. I had always wondered why the Mosel had so many vineyards along its banks when a narrow valley would block a lot of the sun. But the Mosel twists and turns in huge loops as it wends it way down to the Rhine. On all the South and West facing loops the banks are covered in vineyards.

 

By now the weather was once again quite changeable i.e. sunshine and showers and has remained that way until now and the next few days. But the Mosel is just sheer magic with its high sides covered in vineyards. The small wine villages splattered along the sides with chocolate box villages of half timbered houses that are basically unchanged for 500 years. We called in at the most famous of them Bernkastel. There were three hotel boats moored up there and the village was heaving with tourists. Very pretty but destroyed by tourism. Every house on the ground floor was either a restaurant or a tourist shop.

Then on it was to another famous town of Traben-Trabach where we stayed the night. The town is half way down the Mosel to the Rhine from Trier (100 km to Trier and 100km to Koblenz at the confluence of the Mosel and the Rhine).

This week we continue down the Mosel and join the Rhine before putting the foot down and covering 400km in a few days to arrive in Holland by the weekend.

Crossing the Vosges Mountains and onto the Saar

And it rained and it rained for three days and nights.  So we just stayed tied up in Lutzelbourg until it had passed. We had a knock on the door one evening and Josiane and Roger introduced themselves as residents and invited us over for a drink at their house further up the valley. They served a very passable Manhattan cocktail and we talked world trips and the Vosges mountains.

On Tuesday we left on a less rainy morning and headed up the Valley of the Zorn to the great inclined boat lift that we had passed down the previous year.

We zoomed up 40m in just over 5 minutes; a journey if it had been by the original 17 locks would have taken 6 hours. It was still drizzling as motored along the summit pound with no locks so we could just the flaps and turn on the windscreen wipers  and just putt steadily along until we reached a town with an unpronounceable name – Xouaxange where we stopped for the night with two other English barges. The weather was slowly lifting and next morning we left early before turning off the main canal onto the Canal de la Sarre which was the start of the the journey North. By the afternoon the sun was out and the evening was lovely at our mooing in the middle of nowhere with only foxes for company.

The canal meanders through lovely rolling countryside following the contours of the land to maintain a height about the River Saar into which we eventually descended at the town of Sarreguemines where we stayed the night. It has a lovely restaurant right by the moorings in a lovely old building but alas we  ate in.

 

We motored across the border with Germany the next day and stopped at the capital of the Saar Region called Saarbrucken. We were on the outskirts by a former abattoir in the Saarbrucken Motor Boat Club. They made us very welcome and invited us over for a BBQ that evening. We biked into town along the riverside bike path. Past beer gardens selling Bruch No. 1 beer and sausages in a roll.

The town centre is mainly modern with a few old buildings. On the way back we called in at the old abattoir which the club captain had told us sold the very best meat products and bought some very good value local specialities and some sausages for the BBQ that night. When we got back we did some painting on the hull over a few scratches, and then later on took our sausages over to the club where  a lovely wood BBQ was going. While we chatted to club members and drank No. 1 beer, the Club Captain very kindly cooked our sausages. 

It is a great feature of Germany that the various motorboat clubs are so welcoming to overseas visitors like us. They genuinely love to open their doors and do whatever they can to make a great stay. And so it was the next day we stayed at the Dillingen Motorboat Club on a glorious day as the weather had really warmed again now (at least until today).

Today we sailed through the highlight of any cruise on the Saar River – the great bend near Mettlach. Over a 10 km stretch the river carves a great 180 degree bend through red sandstone cliffs covered with woods. All along the river the cyclists were busy, the walkers were out, and the beer gardens were doing a great trade.

This is Germany at its very best. Enjoying the outdoors, enjoying some exercise and enjoying superb beer and sausages to the sound of an oompah-pah band.

We are tied up tonight in the heart of the gorge. No roads, no trains just peace and quiet. We are about 1 km away from Mettlach the home of Villeroy and Boch the porcelain manufacturers whom we will visit tomorrow.  Then a day’s sailing away we reach the Mosel River and the Mosel wines and beautiful villages nestled among the vineyards.

Alsace and Lorraine

We left Dannemarie on Monday and descended 23 locks to Mulhouse right on the Swiss border and formerly a Swiss town. All along the canal there is a sealed towpath that the Euro-Velo route follows. This is a bike route from Budapest to Nantes on the English Channel. It is very popular with cyclists and a whole tourist trade in itself.

  Mulhouse  appears to have been heavily destroyed in wars and there is not much of a character to it. But it was the end of the Canal du Rhone au Rhin and next day it was the Rhine that we entered and immediately accelerated away to 19km/h. Unfortunately after a couple of hours the engine started spluttering and needed coaxing for several minutes to keep it running before it roared back into life. The Rhine is not a good place to have a dead engine!  (We changed fuel filters in the next few days and it appears it was an air lock in one of them causing the problem as we once had before in East Germany.)

Late Afternoon we turned off the Rhine into a small side canal that leads to the capital city of Alsace – Colmar. Alsace has mainly been German over the centuries and it shows. The house are  Germanic with lots of steep roofed half timbered houses. The most common spoken language is German and the food  certainly owes a lot to its German roots. Colmar is probably the largest and most medieval city we have seen in France (at least with half timbered houses). It is very pretty and has many canals and streams flowing through it.

We wandered around getting lost in the maze of streets before stumbling across some landmark which we could re-located ourselves. In the process we came across a lovely restaurant called JY’s in the Petite Venise (Small Venice) area of town. It was a Michelin one star restaurant but the pricing seemed quite affordable and so we gave it a shot.

Well presented food but a bit lacking in flavour was the verdict. But it was a nice lunch and prepared us for the next day and further cruising on the Rhine. We hurtled down the river once more all the way to Strasbourg where we turned off on to the Canal Marne au Rhin. We didn’t stop in Strasbourg as we had been there last year but continued along the canal through the gentle rolling country of the Alsace plain to Saverne where we were going to stop.

 

Alas there was no room in the inn so we carried on 10 more km to Lutzelbourg, wedged into a narrow wooded valley that crosses the Vosges Mountains. It is very pretty place but unfortunately the rain came that night and all the next day so we sat still, played with fuel filters and did some shopping for a wedding present at the beautiful crystal works in the town.

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The weather forecast is not good for this week but we have time on hand to take it easy and wait for the clearer weather. We head west this week to the Sarre Canal and then along that until we reach  Saarbrucken in Germany and start our descent of the River Saar which is a tributary of the Mosel River which in turn is a tributary of the Rhine. 900km to go but very few locks.

The River Doubs

We left Dole on  a  sunny day and headed out on to the River Doubs. The canal for the first 150 km is basically the canalised Doubs with odd forays through side canals cutting off a particularly fast flowing section of the River. North of Isle-sur-le-Doubs it becomes Canal only. It flows through a wide plain to start with but gradually the sides of the valley start closing in and the river flows through windy gorges before emerging higher up into a wider plain again.

The valley sides are limestone and mainly wooded and very remote.  It is quite frankly an extremely beautiful river which we have almost to ourselves. There is the occasional village, very little boat traffic and all the locks are automated. We are issued with a remote control device (like a garage door) and we just click it near a lock and it gets it ready for us. Very quick and efficient.

We left arrived in Raunchot and took the last place on the quay there. The weather was changing and we had rain that night and all the next day so we decided to stay where we were until it had passed over which it had by the following day. We arrived at the provincial capital Besancon enclosed in an almost 360 degree loop of the river with a magnificent Citadel above dominating the whole town.

We spend the next day at Besancon and walked up to the citadel where we had an amazing view of the whole countryside. We saw the Museum of the French Resistance and of Deportation which is based there which even though in French was quite moving.

 

We also visited the cathedral and viewed the magnificent Astronomical clock which gives read outs on 102 astronomical and temporal quantities including the state of the tide in most French Ports, the position of the planets, the dates of Easter, the dates of this year’s solar and lunar eclipses and most amazingly there is one dial which only clicks over one notch every 4 centuries to allow for a leap century.

Given that it is all done by clockwork and is over 150 years old it is quite amazing.  Then it was tome to continue our cruise up the river and we called in at Baumes Les Dames and Isle-sur-le-Doubs which are both old and very quaint.

Yesterday we reached the summit of the canal, no longer on the River Doubs and met yet another NZ boat Erewhon moored at Montreux Chateau.  It is a lovely spot in the middle of nowhere and at an altitude of 341m  there was no other way than down the next day.

And so down it was and we went through 16 locks over 3 kms and stopped at lunchtime for the day at Dannemarie where Wendy cleaned the teak decks with acetic acid. Tomorrow we get to Mulhouse at the end of the canal and then head down the Rhine calling in at Colmar and Strasbourg. The Canal de Rhone au Rhine is 237km long and has 114 locks. Switzerland is just 15kmn  away from here and soon we will be going down the French German border. It’s still over 1000km back to Holland but it’s all down hill and mostly with few locks.

High Summer on the Saone

What a week it has been full of surprises and difficulties.    We left St Jean and immediately knew there was something wrong when the bowthruster didn’t work. We tied up for fuel at the fuel berth and Wendy noticed smoke down below. There was no flames but lots of smoke. We tracked it down to the bowthruster and every time it went on sparks and smoke appeared from one of the terminals. Well we don’t really need a bowthruster but decided to take a different and more direct way back to Holland and get the bowthruster fixed there.We were heading up the River Saone and then across the Vosges Mountains and down into the Moselle valley.  (or so we though). We motored up River to Auxonne where Napoleon had been a Lieutenant in the Artillery around 1780.  It has a lovely fort where Napoleon worked and lots of signs around the town saying Napoleon did this or that here.

It was a nice mooring with a friendly person to help us tie up and all for nothing. In the evening we wandered around the town and admired the statue of guess who.

We also decided that night to see if a small boatyard we had heard of half way between Auxonne and St Jean could fix the bowthruster. So next day we headed back to St Symphorien and found Peter the Harbour Master at the port. Being English we could at last converse reasonably easy with him and he explained that they had a mechanic but he wasn’t terribly good with electrics but by chance he was having dinner that night with Steve a Marine Electrician who was on holiday on his Dutch Barge which he kept at St Symphorien. He might be able to help.  Sure enough Steve turned up the next morning and had a look and saw that the problem was a loose connection that was sparking. Let’s tighten it we all thought.  Too easy!! The sparking and huge currents involved (500 amps) had welded the nut to the bolt. The bolt sheared and we were looking at a bowthruster needing a new special type of bolt which Steve reckoned wouldn’t be available and we might need a new motor at 1500 euros or so. Ouch!  However after a bit of persuasion Steve thought he might be able to crimp a connector to the sheared bolt and get things working.  So he drove back to St Jean to get some parts and by 2.30 we had a working bowthruster. We were back in business. We cast loose and headed back up River to Auxonne and then the next day to Mantoche where we stopped along a lovely grassy bank with a chateau along the bank.

Then next day up to Gray a low depth stopped us mooring, until a barge offered to let us tie up along side. Turned out that they were NZers. Then the next day we continued up the beautiful River Saone.  As we cruised along we heard on the bush telegraph (via email) that the Canal des Vosges which connects the Rivers Saone and Moselle was to be closed in 48 hours time for 2 weeks because of a damaged lock gate.  We couldn’t get there in time so we decided to stop in Savoyeux past a tunnel and consult the Internet.

We had met a Swiss couple on their boat at Verdun sur Doubs and they were about to return to their home port of Savoyeux. They phoned the Waterways authorities who confirmed there was a stoppage for two weeks. Oh dear. So after some discussion we decided to head back the way we had come for the last three days and go back to St Symphorien which is the start of the Canal du Rhone au Rhin, the original way we were going to go. There was a party at the Port that night with a great Blues band and so it was a late night and an early morning start seeing us head at destroyer like speed down the Saone doing in one day what we had taken three to do on the way up.

We stopped overnight at Auxonne again (our third visit) and not long after we had tied up a hire boat arrived and banged into our rear causing some damage. Then an hour later a hire boat in front of us left banging into us as well and scratching the paintwork. We were fed up with hire boats by then.

The next day we turned up into the Canal du Rhone au Rhin and headed for Dole, birth place of Louis Pasteur and on the River Doubs along which the Canal weaved in and out off. It is a beautiful town and we had a great mooring in the heart of things.

We decided to find the pizzeria where I had dined in when last visiting Dole by another boat 27 years ago. It was still there and just as enjoyable as before. We stopped along one of the many small canals that go through Dole to admire the view.

Today we have been continuing up the River Doubs (the canal is really the river at this point until it is too small to take boats). It is very beautiful but requires very careful navigation as there are many rocks and shallow patches to avoid.  We have to cross the Jura Mountains before we can descend into the Rhine Valley at the junction of Switzerland, France and Germany. The mountains are very high but we are following the Doubs River and in the next few days will pass through magnificent gorges as we climb slowly to the summit some 200 km away.