Hi Scott, You'll rue the day you offered me encouragement to tell more sea stories............. As for French canals............ When the company transferred our European office to Paris, I had to leave my German racing class centerboard sailboat in Germany. Boat less, the question in Paris, our new home, was - Now what? At the Amsterdam boat show, I found a salty Norwegian wooden double ended fishing boat style 25 footer, with a one lung SABB diesel - 10 HP with a variable pitch propeller. It was 50% open cockpit space with the engine box in the middle (great engine access: served as a table; and the children could race around it in perfect safety) It also had a nice pipe railing around the cockpit from which to hang fenders. Forward were two berths in a small cabin (sitting headroom) and standing headroom in the pilot house / galley. I thought this would be ideal for the Seine in Paris and on inland water ways, so I placed an order with the Norwegian builder. The following spring we took delivery of the boat in Rotterdam, and then went via inland waterways through Holland, Belgium, and France arriving back in Paris about three weeks later. Traveling the canals is like entering one end of a soda straw.............. There is no sense trying to pass a barge that is doing .01 knots less than you are, because a few kilometers down the "tube" you will hit the next lock and will have to wait anyway. In Holland and Belgium you have large remotely operated locks that will hold maybe 6 barges at a time, with me tucked in under their sterns as the last one in as the gates shut behind you with a mighty clang..... In France they are all hand operated. The lock keepers are French war veterans. They work from about 0600 to 7 PM and that's it for the day. So, if you arrive at quarter to 7 you just tie up and call it a day. There is no sense of getting through that lock, because the next one is maybe only 100 yards away - or maybe even 1 kilometer, and you have to stop anyway. The lock keeper's wife usually has a vegetable garden. You can buy some cucumbers, tomatoes, salad, some eggs to resupply the galley. The canals go through the countryside - rarely touching towns - so you are dependent on the lock keeper's wives for supplies. You help in the lock operation. You operate one half of the locks while the lock keeper works the other half. As you reach a lock - assuming it is open for you - you are waved in by the lock keeper. You moor the boat and then go and close the back half lock gate on your side of the lock, while the lock keeper closes it on his side. Next he goes to the other end of the lock and opens the shutter that lets water in or out of the lock. When the new level has been reached, and there is no more water pressure on the gates, you swing open your side, the lock keeper swings open his side; you climb aboard; press the starter and as your diesel goes pflumpf - pflumpf -pflumpf, you ease the prop into forward pitch and slowly move out into the canal ahead. One morning we were at the top of a staircase of locks going down into a broad valley. All day long it was out of one lock, go 100 yards, and enter the next lock. If my memory serve, we went through 24 locks that day - all hand operated. Oh, and don't forget, the lock keeper gets 1 cigarette per boat that pass through his lock as a tip! Another thing that will shake you is going through a tunnel on a canal. There were no lights in the tunnel, and keeping a straight course in inky blackness to keep from hitting rough stone walls with my varnished pine hull was difficult. Luckily I had a good flashlight on board. As an engineering aside: Some tunnels are so long that the tunnel bore had to be dug to fit the curvature of the earth. If they had just dug it straight, the water in the middle, being higher than at the ends would reduce the water to roof clearance distance. Canal-ology! Barges, with their length, just sort of slide through the tube! ..........and you find an economic pecking order in the canal shipping. Owners of oil tanker barges, chemical barges, are new, modern, live aboard fast vessels. They have beautiful living quarters for the family, including children (swing sets on the hatch covers) as well as the VW Beetle or a FIAT 500 for land transportation. The bottom of the heap are very old, and barely useable, sand and gravel barges. Towed by a tractor along a tow path, with the deck hand steering using a long tiller (10 feet long) and a semicircle of wooden cleats on the deck where he stands, so that he can brace himself against the tiller pressure. No roof over his head - out in the open in all kinds of weather; no cabin.............! I wonder what his wage rate is? Traveling the inland waterways is idyllic; quiet; peaceful; unhurried. Farmer's fields right and left of you, a row of poplars off in the distance that line a French country road; the occasional fisherman sitting on the banks of the canal with a line in the water; or a woman washing laundry in the canal water..........

From Paris, we also went up and down the Seine to Le Havre a few times. Above Rouen, you go through your last lock and then you are in tidal and international waters. At Le Havre you have a tidal range of about 21 feet!

You go downstream from Rouen with the outgoing tide, and upstream with the incoming tide, and since everyone else is waiting for the tide change too, it becomes boat rush hour. Barges, coastal freighters; and somewhere between them all, there you are trying to keep out of the Big Boys way.......... It's a great way to see the Netherlands, Belgium and France. France has a most extensive canal system, and you can go from Paris to the Mediterranean via the canals and the Rhone river. So, start dreaming Scott, and if you need more details, yell. I still have my old canal handbooks with all vital information. Connie