Hi Scott, No, never was on the Canal du Midi. That one is in the south of France; I think............. I'll have to get my old canal books out and recreate the voyage for you.
Your thought of sailing the Flicka to Europe is fine, the only problem is TIME! You'll need the first summer just to get the boat moved into position: East Coast - Europe, before you can begin the real adventure, inside Europe. With our SABB diesel - man I loved that machine: absolute total reliability - you undo your mooring lines in a lock, push off the wall, step into the cockpit; press the starter button and pflumpf - pflumpf, it would fire.......... A variable pitch prop is nirvana. You haven't a clue what you are missing until you use one. With the Norwegian fishing boat, hanging out in the Maas river (Flemish name - don't you dare call it the Meuse - that's the French name and one half the Belgians hate: the Flemish: hate the French part of Belgium) waiting for a lock to open, you control your position by going from flat pitch to a tad ahead, or a tad reverse depending on which way the wind or the current was pushing you. No throttle at all, - you are at idle - just vary your position by changing prop pitch. Having a diesel on the Flicka solves all your major refueling problems. You may - as I did - experience a "slight" problem when you pull up to a refueling barge who takes care of the "big boys". He hasn't got a nozzle small enough to fit your (my) fill opening. His nozzle is about a 3 inch pipe as I recall, with a 90 degree shut off valve. When I needed 10 liters of fuel, he first cleaned his nozzle by dumping about 20 liters back into his tank. Then in fear and awe of such a petite bateau, he handed me the nozzle, while supporting the hose, and I had to do the rest. I put a funnel into my tank filler, and then v-e-r-r-y gently cracked his valve open so that I could control the flow. When my tank was full, I close everything back up and asked how much I owed him. Now he had problems. He was selling fuel by the ton, and here I had bought 10 liters............. He took a piece of chalk and then started calculating from the 1000 liter price back to a 10 liter price. Finally he gave up in frustration and said, give me Ffr 3.- ! I did and that was that! When we left Rotterdam, we went through Dutch waterways until we got to Maasbracht in Belgium (the Flemish part). Then it was up the Maas through Liege, to Dinant in France. That is where we got into the French canal system all the way back to Paris. A fabulous trip. After three years of operating a motorboat on the Seine, my wife was tired of having nothing to do while I puttered down the Seine and up the Oise rivers. The problem was that the Seine was the Paris cesspool, and in August when the flow rate is way down, the Seine may look very pretty from a Paris bridge; but up close and personal - it stinks! That is what lead us to buy our Tripp-Lentsch. The idea was to keep it at Le Havre - the only open port where you can enter or leave at any hour of the day or night. All the rest have locks to keep water in the harbors, and you have about a 2 hour window to enter or leave. Lock gates are opened say 1:30 before high water, and closed again 30 minutes after high water. (21 foot tides!) So if you want to get into that port, you may be stuck in a fore port until such time as the lock gates open again........... Oh, and Scott, don't make the mistake I almost made at Calais. We pulled in and my wife though we should go into a back basin where there were no boats. Somehow it didn't strike me right so I tied up alongside another boat in the harbor to sort it out. A few hours later .............. that whole basin was mud: no water at all! Again 21 foot tides! More anon. Connie _______________________________________________ http://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/montgomery_boats
