Cognac & the Fishing Dinghy
Where we visit Angouleme lake for an enormous snack, and take a lazy boat trip on the Charente.
“Where do you take the relatives when they’ve come to visit you every Summer for the last ten years?”.
You run out of ideas, don’t you?
This year, 2025, we had a bit of a revelation, “let’s just take them where we want to go ourselves rather than creating a ‘where have they been before’ Pinterest style ‘places to visit’ board”.
We decided on Cognac. We’d never been there before, but had often driven through on the way to the Atlantic coast, catching glimpses of Chateau in the distance, and of course, the giant Courvoisier tanks used for blending and storing both the eau-de-vie and blended liquor.
We decided to make a day of it and booked to take a river cruise on the ‘La Demoiselle’, a refurbished ‘Gabarre’, a barge style boat, that first came to prominence in the 18th century, sailing on the Garonne and Dordogne rivers, and in the shallow coastal waters around those estuaries.
We stopped for lunch at Plan d’Eau de la Grande Prairie, the big lake on the N141, the road that goes from Limoges through Angouleme and on to Bordeaux. We ate at the only cafe/restaurant on the lake, Buvette du Plan d’Eau (literally ‘snack bar’ in French). We ordered Croque Monsieur’s all round, and what appeared was, how can I say, a plate of food that was enough to share amongst the five of us, they were enormous and came with a basket of freshly cooked frites, a large Green salad with a very good dressing.
We visit this lake complex often, both for the lake itself, it has an area cordoned off for those death-defying inflatable structures that children love so much, and the adjacent Nautilus swimming pool complex. This is where we first learnt of the French rule about swimming trunks: it’s Speedos or nothing; I don’t know what they think you could be concealing in a pair of Bermuda shorts, but they definitely think that concealment is what is going on. I’ve tried to sneak in several times but there’s always an eagle eyed pool attendant waiting. Don’t they realise how undignified, embarrassing, and plain ugly an older, slightly overweight, man looks in Speedo’s?
The pool itself like many in France, is built for water entertainment, with both indoor and outdoor pools, slides, flumes, and diving boards. It’s got raised areas in the pool for mid-swim chatting, plus a really well stocked cafeteria, and plenty of sun beds. But like the swimming pools in resort hotels, you need to get there fairly early to put your towel on a sun-bed. It’s something that’s always intrigued me, how humans can be so obsessed with getting a sun-bed (it’s well documented that certain nationalities have been known to get up in the small hours just to leave a towel on a sun-bed) and yet when one has been claimed with a towel no-one will move it, and the bed is yours for the day.
It’s only a short drive to Cognac from Angouleme, but the drive will remain seered into my brain for the rest of my life. My brother in law, who I’m going to call Peter (not his real name, there would be fratricide if my sister found out. She doesn’t read Substacks), loves Alfa Romeo’s, and he’d just got a new one, an enormous 4x4 thing with wheels the size of dinner tables. He’s a very chilled out accountant but for some reason when he gets behind the wheel of a car all sensibility leaves him, and he becomes something he’s really not: a trainee racing driver. I’ve been in a car with him before and it was ok, but this time, for some reason he had the devil in him; my sister had to tell him to cool it and slow down in a very fierce manner. He did, but we were all a little shaken. They arrived at our house once, and we had to give her lot’s of wine because she said he’d been trying to kill her all the way from Calais. This was when she uttered the immortal words “If you loved someone why would you drive like that?”.
Our nerves quietened, we arrived at the ‘Les Quais Maurice Hennessy”, the embarkation point for ‘La Demoiselle’. You can see the wealth of Cognac all around you, exquisite commercial and private buildings, mainly in the Beaux-Arts style so prominent at the time, all with beautiful gardens and entrances, I felt like we were stepping back into the 19th century when the Cognac trade was at it’s height. The architecture shows a release from the demise of the Salt trade at the end of the 18th century, almost a celebration of a new found prosperity from Cognac.
We took our seats, well tried too anyway. I wanted to sit next to the railing but wasn’t allowed for some bizarre reason, the woman who was seating everyone wanted groups to sit in the same row and wouldn’t entertain my wishes in the slightest. All I got was a very Gallic brush off. The window seat I wanted was given to a couple who seemed to think there was no-one else on the boat, such was their ‘amour’.
But the river was wonderful. We set off through a lock, operated by a young guy who had enormous strength and stamina: opening gates, closing gates, running back and forth, and as soon as we got on the other side we were in the Charente proper: wide, very clear water, slow moving, and it would have been very relaxing if it wasn’t for the tour guide who wouldn’t let me sit where I wanted (I was still harbouring considerable resentment), and her non-stop babbling. But I finally managed to tune her out and let the resentment recede.
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We passed a number of what looked like waterside hamlets: three or four very nice houses with a small jetty, all looking lived in with cars in the driveways. Maybe they were holiday homes but they looked a little too inhabited, stuff on windowsills, bit of detritus in the drive, no, not holiday homes. And there were a couple of grand country houses as well, one with a sculpture park for a front garden. I say garden but it was probably a couple of acres.
And then, the main events - Fishing & Canoeing.
I’ve never seen so many canoes doing being used to do so many different things: picnicking, fishing, sleeping, spanning tributaries, and animal transportation to name a few. The river was literally awash with canoes, all Yellow, probably because they all came from the same rental outlet. Other than the boat we were on it was the main means of transport on the Charente. Perhaps because it was holiday season; I imagine in the cooler winter months the river looking less like a lawn that a swarm of Yellow bugs had landed on.
But people were fishing from an even stranger craft.
It looked like a chopped in half dinghy adorned with fittings for all the equipment you would need for a days fishing on a river. The occupants feet hang in the water adorned with flippers to give propulsion. I watched one guy, obviously a virtuoso operator, literally doing pirouettes and then speeding off after shoals he’s spotted. The river holds a wide range of freshwater fish including Tench, Roach, Bass, Carp, and Perch. No wonder the fishing accessories have developed to such a high level.
When we finally turned around to start our return journey, there was a small tributary that had what seemed to be a canoe meeting going on. About 20 canoes were ranged in a circle with someone in another canoe at the centre with a megaphone. I couldn’t make out what was being said but it reminded me of a scene from the TV series ‘Ozark’ where they held river services. Attendees arrived in their boats to listen to a pastor delivering a waterborne service.
Next week I’m writing about the source of the Charente.
Image credits: All images copyright the author Nick Garnett
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