The next installment of our European cruising experiences. Our son was flying into Paris to cruise with us for 2 weeks & if things worked out we could meet our daughter & son-in-law in Dover for a few days. Lynn & I moved from Port Arsenal in Paris to Port Cergy on the Oise River. Cergy is in the outskirts of Paris but it is a 7 to 8+ hr run for us down the Seine and up the Oise River. We had stayed at Port Cergy in 2003 on our old boat "Caroline", nice harbor but not many visitor berths. Cergy has direct bus service to Charles de Gaulle Airport so it was easy to meet Bryant. The lower Seine, esp. below the junction with the Oise River, doesn't have many stopping places for pleasure boats. And below the city of Rouen there are no stopping places, the guides say pleasure boats may only tie up in emergencies. The last lock on the Seine is above Rouen, below that lock the Seine is tidal and that must be considered along with sunrise & sunset - pleasure boats may not operate after sunset. This can be a real problem for low powered sailboats traveling up stream in the fall or winter months, there aren't enough day light hours to make the 122 km from the mouth of the Seine to Rouen. So after much study I picked the town of Les Andelys for a first stop then Rouen for the second day then to Le Havre the following. The chart showed Les Andelys having two places for pleasure boats so I was hoping at least one would be an acceptable mooring. Les Andelys would be a 8 to 9 hr run from Cergy with 3 locks and would position us for an easy run to Rouen the next day - if there was an acceptable mooring. We left Port Cergy early, had no delays at the locks and arrived in Les Andelys in mid-afternoon. The first mooring was a number of huge dolphins 30 meters or so apart for commercial barges. Between the last set of dolphins there was an old steel barge tied off with a gangway to the shore. It didn't look the most inviting so we went a bit further downstream looking for the yacht harbor shown on the chart. We found the tight little entrance to the yacht harbor and slowly poked our nose in. We got in but no place to tie up and very shallow, the thrusters were even kicking up mud. So back to the first spot and tied up on the old barge. Later that evening two commercial barges tied up on the dolphins in front of us but no one asked us to move. The next day we cleared the last lock and ran the last hour against the tide but that allowed us to approach the pontoon at the Rouen "port de plaisance" facing downstream. In the evening I printed out my cruise plan for reaching Le Havre. The tide for the 23rd of May was 6.54 meter (20+ ft) at Le Havre, less than the 9+ meters (30 ft) for some spring tides, but still significant. Leaving Rouen at 6:00am sunrise we would run with the tide for 3 1/2 hrs, then against the tide for about 4 hrs then with the tide again till we cleared the sea buoys 5 & 6 around 3:00pm. Less than 5 minutes after the tide turned against us, we met our first ocean-going freighter running upstream for Rouen, followed by another freighter and then 4 or 5 pleasure boats all running hard with the incoming tide. For us everything worked as planned. Clearing the #6 sea buoy we circled out around the sand banks for the Le Havre harbor entrance then had a bit of confusion with the harbor control lights - we finally just followed several other sailboats in and tied up at the visitor's pontoon. Nice harbor with an all tide & all weather entrance and two large marinas. We did have one "boat problem" in this period, on Saturday leaving Port Cergy the radar scanner quit. Three or four weeks earlier on the canals with the mast down rain had gotten into the dome via the cable grommet. Rain water came out the drain hole when I put the mast up but the unit fired up ok & I sealed up the grommet with tape. A week or so later, running on the Seine to Port Cergy it had worked every day but now it quit. Sent an emailed to Aquanaut Saturday night and they responded Monday saying to contract Raymarine directly. We were in Le Havre, a big harbor with lots of services and needed to wait the next day for better weather anyway, shouldn't be a problem to get it looked at should it? Called the UK Raymarine Help Line and was switched to a technician in the US since it was after hours in the UK. Ran through a couple of tests and agreed we needed to have a service technician look at it. Then the "comedy" started. To cut this short, over the next four days we could never get the Raymarine French distributor in Paris to get anyone to come to the boat to look at the unit. Aquanaut tried (even their dealer in Strasbourg), the Dutch distributor for Raymarine called us, the UK & US Help Desks - to no avail. I finally gave up on the French distributor. We got to Dover late Friday afternoon just before a three day holiday weekend. I called the Dover Raymarine dealer, Smye Rumsby Ltd. Phil was just leaving the office for a week's vacation but would stop by on his way home. We pulled the cover off the dome and found the unit covered in condensation. The fix, let it dry out in the sun - condensation was on the cable connections, the unit itself is sealed. It has worked ever since. >From Le Havre we ran up to Dieppe on Wednesday then the next day to Boulogne sur Mer, timing it so we ran with the tide up the coast - two 6 to 7 hr runs. On Friday we ran north to just opposite Calais then crossed the shipping lanes to Dover, a 6 hr run. Crossing the Channel traffic separation zones must be done at right angles and is strictly enforced in the Dover Straight - otherwise expect to be met by the Coast Guard and pay a stiff fine. The visibility was super, we could see the Dover cliffs as we traveled north toward Calais - plus we could see all the freighters & ferries - lots of freighters & ferries. We only had two potential conflicts with freighters when crossing the separation zones. In the second case we stopped completely to let an empty tanker past. The entrance to Dover harbor was "interesting". We called Dover Port Control when 2 miles out and were told to call again when 200 meters from the west entrance. The tide was running 4 knots across the entrance and it seemed to take for ever to close the distance. When we were finally just off the entrance Dover Port Control cleared us in and then once inside we called the marina office for a berth assignment - straight forward & nice to talk with native English speakers even if it was the "Queen's English" ;-) Foot note: Lynn & I are back in Sneek on Legrace. We had a frustrating week with no email service on the mobile phone but hopefully that's fixed now & we'll get caught up on our email. Bob & Lynn Williamson MV Legrace Aquanaut Drifter 1250 AK Sneek, NL