Adventures of a Reluctant Boating Wife by Angela Rice

Author:Angela Rice
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

SEINE BUT DIFFERENT

Our winter adventure had somehow transformed a Reluctant Boating Wife into a Quasi-Informed, Albeit Still Intermittently Reluctant Boating Wife…

Back home from our French adventure, I packed away the charts and pilot books and reflected on how differently I viewed them now. Before we left they seemed threatening and hostile, taunting me with my wimpishness. Now they were old friends, with happy memories reminding us what we had achieved. I brushed away an aged crumb of croissant from one of the bright red and blue squiggly plans of the French inland waterways and spotted our old friend the Tancarville Canal, a tempting little route from Le Havre to a vague spot half way to Rouen.

‘Why battle up that big nasty river when there’s this nice easy canal?’ I recalled demanding of John, when we were at the planning stage. He was wrestling at the time with calculations based on the timings of the flood tide on which he planned to catch a ride up to Rouen by sunset, our likely average speed, daylight hours available, GMT and summertime issues, Honfleur lifting bridge and lock opening times… It seemed to me he was making heavy weather of a simple job. There was an easy solution begging us to notice it.

‘All the books say this is the way to go,’ he muttered defensively, frowning at something incomprehensible on his calculator.

‘What do you mean, all the books? How many have you looked at?’ I asked, with the characteristic gentle deference on which our successful marriage is built. He sighed, pulled open a drawer, dumped a pile of tomes in front of me, and returned to his sums.

Hmm. It appeared that the canal had a surely unnecessarily large number of locks, opening at wilfully awkward times. Also a preponderance of large (I read ‘intimidating’) commercial traffic, which had priority over trivial leisure stuff like us. So the time at which we might have finally emerged on to the Seine was, at best, extremely unpredictable. As there was no convenient berth, mooring or even anchorage with protection from the wash of passing barge traffic or from the currents of the tidal waters of the Seine before Rouen, on one must go, whatever the state of the tide, and probably without sufficient daylight. Oh, have I mentioned that night navigation on the river was prohibited? So that effectively meant you’d have to return to Le Havre or Honfleur, tiller between the legs – if tide and light permit it.

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