An Irishman's boating diary
Well it’s a wet Easter Saturday and the weather should be reasonably good by now. But it was raining when we woke this morning and it’s still raining. when we untied at 1pm it was raining and it kept raining all day. We tied up in Dompierre sur Besbre at 5:30pm and it was still raining. Now don’t get me wrong, after all I’m a Paddy and well used to rain, and I’m used to wet Easters too, but I thought this sort of rain only occurred in Ireland?
This is Digoin in the dark. It’s a good spot to stay with all the facilities you might need. That’s our boat “Driftwood” nearest the camera.
It has been unusually cold and wet here for the past ten days or so. We were waiting for an improvement in the weather in a small town called Coures les Barres and today 1-April-10 was just such a day. It’s still cold but at least the sun came out as we headed south towards the city of Decize. It was a seven hour trip which was a bit more that we had hoped to do.
Parting is such sweet sorrow that I shall say goodnight till it be morrow. (Billy Shakespeare). Ah yes a new season is upon us and it’s sad leaving the good friends that we have been lucky enough to make in Briare. Soon we head off along the canal again. I had been looking forward to leaving Briare in the spring sunshine since the first snow and ice of the winter appeared last December. But when the day finally did
Well St Patrick’s day was great gas, the weather couldn’t have been better and we decorated the boat in true tacky style as you can see in the pic below.
The Briare Aqueduct is one of France’s greatest landmarks and I was hoping to skipper a 56 Mtr barge across it. The barge in question belongs to Mark & Annie and they weren’t actually aware of my plan up to this point.
When we decided to make this life changing decision we were deciding to give up a fairly well off lifestyle in favour of one where we are not so well off. Or are we? Frankly I think that we are much richer than before, we have
Well all that snow and ice that you saw in our last blog has melted now and
the temperatures are generally well above freezing, 6 degrees today but there is a very cold wind out which makes it feel a lot cooler. We took the local bus to Gien our largest neighbouring town yesterday, it was the first time that Mar and myself had been out of Briare without proper adult supervision but we managed not get lost or get into much trouble.