It’s been a hot summer, and I’ve been dying to swim. Officially, you’re not allowed to swim in the Tarn River. But there’s a way around this: you can wild-moor your boat in a spot where no-one is looking.
That’s what Roy and I did for a couple of days – we on Karanja and our Dutch friends Jack and Sanne on their beautiful, 124-year-old Dutch barge, Artemis.
(I’d like to say they invited us to join them, but that wouldn’t be entirely accurate. Rather, they didn’t say no when we invited ourselves.)
You’re not allowed to swim in the canal, and that’s understandable. Though it’s teeming with fish, don’t be misled: it’s far from salubrious. Most boats simply pump out their black-water tanks (i.e. sewage) straight into the canal water.
The ban against swimming in the cool, clean Tarn is less comprehensible. If you try it within view of Moissac – even off your own vessel, discreetly – someone in authority will soon come along in a little boat, tell you off strictly in French and make you get out of the water.
Escaping upstream
From Moissac port, you descend through the double lock and turn left to head upstream on the wide and lovely Tarn River.
Artemis had gone ahead of us. When we arrived, Jack and Sanne helped us tie up right beside them, also securing us to a couple of handy trees on the bank.
Immediately, Sanne took me up a steepish little river-bank path to the border of a fruit farm, where we scrumped a couple of perfect windfall apples.
Further on, Sanne pointed out a hazelnut tree, and also a wild fig tree laden with fruit, some of them perfectly purple and ripe. So, that’s what figs are supposed to taste like!
They’ve been coming to this spot every summer for around ten years, she tells me – it’s something they love to do. The first time, they stayed for almost a month, Sanne biking along farm roads into town for supplies.
Time for a swim
Roy hung the gangplank as ladder over the side for me and I slid into the cool water for a magical swim – warned by Jack just in time of the current, as I merrily made off downstream.
The story of Jack, Sanne and Artemis
Still with her original hull, Artemis was a working barge when Jack van Dieten (then 19) and his father bought it in 1963, at a small place near Groningen, the Netherlands. It was still under sail, and had a 12-metre mast.
“I had always sailed,” he explains; “in fact I was a sailing instructor.”
History and conversion
“We know a little about the boat’s history,” says Jack. “It was built in 1894 in Briltil, the Netherlands, and worked anything that could be loaded – grain, potatoes, coal and more.”
Jack’s family chose the name Artemis after one of the Greek gods – the god of living in free nature. (It had had two previous names: De Jonge Klaas in the 1930s, and then Twee Gezusters.)
In 1933, its length had been extended to 19 metres. But Jack and his father found 19m too long, and so decided to bring it back to its original length of 14.6m.
As a working boat, it had no interior living space, and only a very small wheelhouse – where, unbelievably, says Jack, the previous owner lived with his wife and six children!
“So we completely designed the whole space ourselves. Since then, the only change we have made was to convert the second bedroom into a dining area, about ten years ago.”
That bedroom wasn’t missed, because there are beds everywhere, as Sanne puts it: ready-made-up beds can be pulled out from either side of the living room, and the dining-room furniture can also be converted into a bed.
Family getaways
Living in a small town near Utrecht, Jack father’s family, and later Jack, Sanne and their two sons, spent all their holidays on Artemis. From 1965 to 1980, they explored the waterways of Holland and Belgium.
From 1980, Jack recalls long summer holidays in the north of France. (The south was of course too far.) He was working as a vet at the university, he explains, with a lot of on-call duty, so he had about six weeks’ leave each summer.
At that time in the north of France, the locks were manual, so they had to do everything themselves – going through up to 30 locks a day. Nowadays, it’s all electrical.
“It was much more fun in those times,” he recalls. “Each lock had a lock keeper, who would sell you some salad, or a chicken. Tourist boats were very rare then.”
In 2006, they brought Artemis down south to the Canal du Midi, and Moissac later became their home port.
The future?
“One day the boat will have to be sold, of course,” says Jack sadly. “Sanne and I are in our late seventies, and things are not so easy as they were 30 years ago.”
Last year, Sanne broke her arm badly in two places. And then, just a couple of months ago, Jack stepped backwards into an open hatch and broke his arm. True to form, he made a joke of it, instructing the doctor to set the broken arm in such a way that he could still use it to lift a glass of wine.
This down to earth, indomitable and gracious couple are truly inspirational. We’re lucky to count them among our friends.
For more about Jack and Sanne’s travels, you can find his own absorbing blog here.
Great friends indeed. We shall miss them greatly as we make our way up north for a while.