Originally the plan was that we, three couples and two dogs, would take a leisurely cruise on the Canal du Midi in a very comfortable hire cruiser operated by one of France’s premier boat hire companies Nicols, who design, build and operate some 400 cruisers. This plan was much like the cruises on Nicols Boats that some amongst us had done in the past before Covid, but this time we planned to cruise on a section of the Canal that we hadn’t explored previously.

Over the past twenty years or so, given that several amongst us are experienced seafarers, we have undertaken cruises on a number of different models from Nicols’ extensive range of cruisers and have then provided reports both on the boats themselves and on the cruising areas that we explored. On this occasion we planned to start and finish our cruise from Port Lauragais, one of Nicols bases on the Canal du Midi between Toulouse and Carcassonne. As I said, that was the plan!

A day or two prior to our departure from the UK I received a call from Nicols to ask whether we might like to consider a change of plan and rather than starting and finishing in Port Lauragais we could instead take one of their latest and largest cruisers from the Nicols base at Le Somail near Beziers north up the Canal du Midi to its home base at Port Lauragais.

The idea was quite appealing but there were a couple of logistical issues that we needed to address before agreeing on the change of plan. Nicols were very helpful and cooperative as regards these, including allowing us more time to complete what we correctly anticipated could be quite a challenging 120km cruise through no less than sixty locks, fifty-nine of which were “uphill”, to the summit of the Canal at the Seuil de Naurouze 190m above sea level - only the last lock from the summit to Port Lauragais was a less demanding “downhill” one.

So, after a lunchtime meeting in Cholet with a representative of Nicols management team, it was agreed that we would board our boat, one of the latest 15m long Sixto Fly class cruisers, at Le Somail the next afternoon with the aim of delivering her to Port Lauragais the following week-end giving us at least seven full days to complete the voyage which looked quite feasible had everything gone to plan and had the weather not had other ideas!

Despite travelling from different parts of France, all three couples and our two dogs duly arrived on the Saturday afternoon in glorious sunshine at the very attractive port village of Le Somail. Once we had sorted out who was to have which of the three cabins, stowed all our gear and parked our cars in the secure car-park at the base, we welcomed the Nicols engineer aboard to go through the usual procedure of showing us how everything worked including the heating, air-conditioning and on-board 240volt generator. We then completed the necessary paperwork at the office.

However, by this time, it was late afternoon so we made the decision to book a meal at the very popular local Auberge for that evening and to spend the next hour or two exploring the beautiful historic village, including a visit to what is the biggest bookshop any of us had ever seen!

The village of Le Somail is really not much bigger than a hamlet. Long before its development as a tourist centre, it was clearly an important commercial port on the Canal during the 17th - 19th centuries with some 28,000 travellers passing through the village in one year during the 19th century. The buildings themselves, such as the Auberge, the former port office, the chapel and the warehouses are indicative of Le Somail’s past importance. Today it’s not only one of the most popular of Nicols Boats hire cruiser bases it is also a tourist destination in its own right and attracts lots of visitors from far and wide; it boasts a busy and very helpful tourist office too.

We spent a couple of hours during the late afternoon exploring the village, visiting the bookshop and the “provisions barge” that’s moored on the canal to stock up with various supplies, such as fresh milk, that we were likely to need during the early part of our voyage before enjoying a pleasant meal at the Auberge alongside the Canal.

Sunday morning saw us preparing to cast off when we noticed that the fresh water pump appeared to be struggling to supply water at any reasonable pressure. We managed to get hold of the engineer who had given us our briefing the previous afternoon, which was lucky because it seems that the problem had not been reported by the previous hirers. Having to wait whilst a new pump fitted meant that we didn’t actually leave Le Somail until Sunday midday so it was just as well we’d agreed some leeway with Nicols as regards when we needed to get the boat to Port Lauragais.

So, in very pleasant weather but with a forecast of heavy rain and strong winds overnight and the following morning, we made our way through the four locks between Le Somail and the quite large port of Homps where we moored for the night after booking lunch the following day at the nearby restaurant. Homps is an attractive large village with the third biggest port on the Canal, a marina, a supermarket, an excellent wine shop and several restaurants all within easy walking distance.

The large canal basin/marina at Homps was one of the relatively few places where the 29m commercial barges could turn round and enjoyed a prosperous period in the 17th-19th centuries thanks to shipments of the local Minervois wines to Sete, Toulouse and Bordeaux.

The weather forecast proved to be accurate. During the night and the following morning we experienced torrential rain and high winds that, thanks to me having left our cabin window slightly open when my wife Lois and I went to bed, managed to soak all our bedding before our dog Fudge woke us all up at around 2 am. Lois and I ended up spending the rest of the night on the sofa bed in the saloon, and we owe a huge vote of thanks to our friends for lending us extra bedding for what was left of the night, and for helping us to dry out all our bedding, (including the mattress!)in time for us to use the following night.

With an overall length of 15m (the maximum permitted for hire cruisers) the Sixto Fly is one of the most sophisticated and luxurious hire cruisers operating on the French inland waterways but is designed mainly to take advantage of the summer weather conditions, especially those prevailing in the south of France. Hence the “Fly Deck” with its Bimini cover. There are two steering positions; one inside in front of the saloon, the other on a “Fly Bridge” which commands a far better all round view and helps no end as regards manoeuvring in restricted spaces, especially in the locks where there is no room for error! Hence we made a decision to use the fly bridge helm position most of the time rather than the lower inside position.

We enjoyed a very good lunch at the restaurant that we’d moored alongside at Homps. After lunch the rain eased up and we set off immediately to the next nearest port at La Redorte where we moored for the night having managed just a pretty pathetic 5km and only one lock that day. Obviously we were falling well short of our daily target which required us to average at least eight locks every day!

Come the next morning we got away early and managed to cover some 20kms and negotiate a dozen locks during the passage from Le Redorte to the port of Trebes about 10kms east of Carcassonne and its famous Cite. Trebes is a bustling town with a busy port where fortunately we managed to find a mooring with mains electricity and fresh water connections. So, after what had definitely been our busiest day so far, we retired to a nearby Italian restaurant which would you believe also served the local speciality Cassoulet which was enjoyed (I think!) by at least one of us.
The weather during this long day was fair but with a pretty fresh wind and even stronger gusts bordering on gale force. Previously we have had other boats, mainly hire cruisers, some of which were rather obviously crewed by people not used to dealing with strong and gusty winds. This made for some interesting experiences when the lock-keepers understandably wanted to accommodate two, three or even four boats in a lock chamber at the same time; a deliberate policy designed to conserve water.

However we were quite relieved to find ourselves alone after having shared a lock chamber on three occasions with one particular hire cruiser who appeared either to not understand or to simply ignore the lock keeper’s instructions. We finally managed to lose him when he moored so far back from a lock that the lock-keeper closed the gates before we could enter it.

To be fair, locking in the winds we were experiencing wasn’t that easy even for an experienced person on the helm, especially when several locks are only entered through a very low bridge requiring whoever is on the upper helm to duck down or even to kneel down on occasion. In fact the same cautionary ducking was needed for quite a few of the many bridges over the canal too.

Not only was locking quite challenging for the helmsman, it was pretty demanding and hard work for the crew too, one of whom had to be dropped ashore about fifty metres before the lock so he or she could make their way to the correct side of the lock chamber to receive fore and after mooring lines from the members of the crew still aboard. On a 15m long boat the mooring lines need to be pretty long and quite heavy duty which makes them distinctly difficult to throw to the person ashore, especially when the person concerned may often be 5m above the crew member on the boat! With our crew all retirees and three of them ladies it had been a pretty demanding day with the prospect of two more similarly interesting days to follow!

Despite the somewhat adverse wind and weather we were all enjoying ourselves. The two dogs Stanley and Fudge (both Cocker-poos) seemed happy with occasional walks along the old towpaths and longer walks in the evening. All in all we were all having a good time on this beautiful historic canal.

The next day dawned sunny but still with a pretty strong wind so we pushed on through the city of Carcassonne (with some very good views of the Cite) for some 30kms to our next overnight stop not far from the port of Bram. This stretch included no less than sixteen locks but, having left Carcassonne astern, there wasn’t nearly so much traffic on the canal. This meant that we were able to maintain a more consistent speed not only through the manned locks but also through the new automatic unmanned versions installed on the more upstream reaches of the Canal du Midi towards Toulouse.

Given the wind conditions my friend and former Coastguard colleague Malcolm, who like myself, had plenty of boating experience, had been sharing the helm between us. However, neither of us had ever encountered automatic locks before so we agreed to ask our other male crew member Mike, who’d been doing all the work jumping ashore, talking to the lock keepers and securing our mooring lines if he could now master whatever procedure was needed for us to operate these unmanned automatic locks. The procedure is actually pretty straightforward albeit that the instructions are in the form of diagrams alongside push-buttons and it’s not immediately obvious that having closed the locks gates behind you, and watched the lock chamber fill with water via the sluice gates, the exit gate will only open after you push the button again!

Our next stop involved a run of some 20kms and another fifteen locks to the town of Castelnaudary, famous for its Cassoulet of course. We were lucky to find a nice comfortable mooring with a mains electric connection in the inner basin opposite the harbourmaster's office. We spent some time here and took advantage of the harbour facilities that included the mooring, electrical and water connections, posh showers etc. All for €16.00 for 24 hours which compared very favourably to some of the campsites in the south of France!

Unfortunately the same could not be said of our choice of a restaurant for our evening meal that night. It was on the harbourside and, had the weather been warmer that evening, we could have had a table outside. The choice of main courses was very limited indeed (mostly salads) and the quality was not at all what you would normally expect from a bistro in France – very disappointing. We later discovered that the quite a few British privately owned boats, who spend the winter months from November through to March here when the locks are all closed, use a nearby bar/restaurant which is apparently much better than our choice had been.

So to our last day’s run from Castelnaudary to Port Lauragais a distance of about 12km with a number of uphill locks leading to the summit of the Canal du Midi some 190m above sea level at the Seuil de Naurouzeour, where there is a monument to Pierre-Paul Riquet the engineer who directed the building of the Canal du Midi in the 17th Century. The monument, in the form of an obelisk, is situated about ½ km from the canal and if you want to visit it involves a pleasant tree-lined walk, thoroughly enjoyed by Fudge who had her first run of the week off her lead.

Finally we reached our last and 60th lock which, for the first time of course, was a DOWNHILL lock where the ropework is much easier as all that is needed is to take a half-turn around the lock chamber bollards and pay out the rope as the boat drops down as the water is released from the lock chamber.

In no time at all after that last lock we entered the spacious modern canal basin/marina at Port Lauragais, found the appropriate mooring, tied up and reported to the Nicols harbourmaster’s office before enjoying a good meal at the marina restaurant before what was most of our crew’s last night aboard before taking the taxi kindly provided by Nicols the next morning, a Sunday, for the hour and a quarter drive back to Le Somail to collect our cars. We then drove back to Port Lauragais to pack our things, clean the boat and prepare it for inspection the following morning for which Lois and I and Fudge stayed aboard overnight.

Judging from the feedback from our “crew”, everyone seems to have thoroughly enjoyed this cruise despite some pretty indifferent and at times quite challenging weather conditions and the pretty hard work undertaken by all those manning to the ropes. I think by the end of the voyage everyone, not least myself, felt a sense of achievement at having accomplished what we set out to do without any serious mishaps and without any damage at all to the boat apart from my having broken a bedside coat hook in our cabin when removing the bedding that had got wet during the second night’s storm! We all started out as good friends and we all ended up as good friends even though we did have a row one evening!

Would we all want to do it again? Probably, albeit in warmer and less windy weather, and preferably, given that we’re all retirees, on the south-eastern stretch of the canal where there are fewer locks!