Information - moorings

 
The information in the following pages reflects our own personal experiences on travelling and mooring on canals and rivers. The specifics are correct for the times of our own visits, and we hope they may be useful to you, especially if there are places listed that you have not yet visited.  But, we’d better make a few notes about our observations, lest we lead you astray.

The timings we have indicated for engine hours (the amount of time the engine was actually running) are accurate.  But they can vary considerably from day to day for the same journey, depending on traffic patterns and the amount of time spent waiting to enter locks.

If you want to know how long it will take to reach the next stop, you will need to add sufficient time to the engine hours to account for things like lunch stops, and whether you might stop if you see something interesting along the way.  Generally speaking, we would add at least one more hour to the day’s engine hours to determine how long it really would take us to get from point A to point B.

We’ve specified a bit about moorings – quays and pontoons – because we find it useful to know what we expect to tie up to.  Of course, it’s even better if you know that there will be bollards, or rings, or stanchions, or nothing except the stakes that you hammer in yourselves – but that’s perhaps taking away too much of the captain’s tension about making a successful landfall if we list so much detail.  We are fond of quays, and particularly dislike the newer finger pontoons that bounce like a trampoline when you step down onto them, mooring rope in hand!

Our interest in shops is primarily focused on whether we can buy daily bread, and groceries to meet our menu requirements. Pharmacies are occasionally appreciated: and a bricolage at least once every couple of weeks is useful.  Those are the essentials – everything else is gravy!

We accept no responsibility for the accuracy of the information we give, except to say that conditions were as we have noted at the time(s) we visited.  Facilities change, and if we are notified we’ll modify our descriptions  We thank all those who have already provided comments and snapshots.

As foreigners in France ourselves, there is one further note we would make.  Please remember that before you begin any 'conversation' (with éclusiers, let us say), it is customary and polite throughout France to start by saying "bonjour".  To not do so is considered rude: to offer this small greeting is to open the door to a very civilised and friendly encounter.


If you want to find information about a specific destination, put the name into the search engine and you'll be pointed in the right direction, with multiple references if we've been there multiple times.