Le Havre to Rouen - 1st leg

Le Havre to Rouen is a tricky bit of travel.

You must make it in one daylight period (it is not legal to operate a pleasure boat on any of France's rivers or canals after dark) and there is no place to stop before Rouen.

Barges operate round the clock, or until they reach a closed lock (there are no locks between Rouen and the sea).

Then, it is only feasible to start the trip on an ebb tide, which makes the current of the Seine navigable to a low powered vessel.

We got lucky on that one, as the ebb was occurring in the early am.

So, we just needed to start at the crack of dawn...which almost happened (so far I have a perfect track record on missing early starts).

We sneaked into Rouen well after dark (should we run our lights or will that just get us in trouble?).

I had tried to cut a few corners (getting into slower current) but several clunks to the keel later I gave up on that strategy and stayed inside the buoys (apparently my local knowledge wasn't that good that day).

The next morning off we went to the VNF office, not sure of what strategy we might use (should Jean-Yves admit he was French, should I do my perfect dumb American act and “pretend” my French was bad?).

Anyway, it all turned out fine as the safe that contained all the forms and documents was broken!

So, no sticker could be issued until I reached Paris and I was issued a letter to attest that the safe was kaput.

Which meant I couldn't find out if I could get a locks sticker before getting all the way to Paris!?!

I wondered what the trucking charges would be to get Severance from Paris back to any place with salt water...

-- Scott