The Seine to Le Havre

One of the best things about boating is the people that you meet. In Rouen we moored next to Jean-Pierre & Françoise on their beautiful steel boat ‘Maloya’. The last leg of the trip down the Seine involves a ten hour journey with the last hour being at sea. Unfortunately, there is nowhere to moor your boat during the trip so if you have a problem then you would have to try and drop anchor – not a good thing to do in a busy river. Also, predicting what the sea state is going to be like by the time you finally get there is difficult. We were therefore grateful to Jean-Pierre when he offered to travel with us down stream to Le Havre. They had lived on board Maloya for a number of years so they were both well equipped and skilled at reading the weather from a number of sources. Using information gathered from a variety of web sites he predicted, correctly, that Friday would be the best day to go. He timed the tides to perfection and the journey proved to be both relaxing, and economical with the diesel, by making best use of the tides.

Leaving Paris

The first part of the journey, when we leave Paris on Friday, will take us further up the river Seine. This will mean that we will go past the junction with the Marne and through the industrial suburbs of Paris. After that, the surroundings should become more countrified with the Forest of Senart on the right bank and then Fontainbleu’s forest on the other. When we reach St. Mammes we will turn off the Seine onto the Canal de Loing. This is mostly man-made, it was opened in 1723, and runs for most of its length alongside the Loing river. There are a number of holiday boat hire companies on this route so, hopefully, there will be more places for pleasure boats to moor than we have experienced on the Seine.

We will be entering a region where vines are grown so we are hoping for good food and wine along this route.

Sundays

Most of the week the River Seine has been devoid of people – apart from the commercial traffic. However, on Sundays the sullen fishermen appeared attached to their lines. Most people, including the bargees, waved to us as we passed by; but not the fishermen. We also encountered many people rowing and occasionally a relatively small family cruiser out for the day. The numbers of these increased as we drew nearer to the city until finally we reached Maisons-Laffitte, about 60 kilometres from the centre of Paris. Here the entire river was blocked by dozens of small yachts. Everybody knows that power gives way to sail so we could have been there all day.

With a flourish, the commodore drew alongside Jomima and noticed our Red Ensign. He then shouted, “Follow me” and set off at about twice our usual speed towards the fleet of yachts. Like Moses parting the waters, the small boats all moved aside to let us through. There was very little wind for them so they all enjoyed riding our wake as we passed swiftly by. We were probably the highlight of their day and it certainly improved ours.

The Locks

The locks on the river Seine are big by any standards. Commercial barges still ply the river in reasonable numbers; sometimes a barge will be pushing up to three other barges like a train pushing carriages. On other occasions we have been faced by a tug pushing two pairs of barges tied together. The locks have chambers large enough to accommodate a single shunting barge, pushing along two strings of four barges i.e. 180m long by 11.4m wide. We felt very small and vulnerable when moored in a lock and, even though we tried to stop near the back of the lock, the inrush of water made Jomima lurch and pull strongly on her ropes. On one occasion a rope caught on a ladder and I had to whistle loudly (something I can still do fortunately) to attract the attention of the lock keeper high up in his tower. Jomima was leaning over dangerously but I managed to free the rope and this resulted in a violent rocking motion and a bent hand rail.

We were always going up in the Seine locks so our usual procedure was for Ann, firstly, to temporarily tie us to the wet and slimy ladder in the lock wall. Then, secondly, I would climb the ladder with large bowlines (loops), over my shoulder, attached to the ends of two 25m ropes secured fore and aft. I would then put the loop of the front line over a bollard as near as possible to the front of the boat and then hold the second rope around a bollard near the back of the boat. However, because the bollards were designed for the large barges, these bollards were frequently some distance apart. We then had to keep pulling in these two ropes as Jomima rose up the lock as the water rushed in.

We will both be very glad to start the journey south where we will be using the smaller locks of the Canal de Bourgogne.

Vernonette to Paris

The remainder of the journey to Paris was simply hard work, particularly for the crew. Unlike the Thames and other UK rivers, 90% of the traffic was commercial barges. As a result, the majority of moorings were designed for them and totally unusable by small boats like Jomima. The only mooring facilities, for small boats in transit, were badly neglected and without the stated power and usable water. However, I will provide a few details of some of the more interesting things we encountered during the remaining four days of the journey to Paris.