COMMERCE

Just so you don't think it's all pretty places, restaurants, food markets, wine and cheese we do travel through industrial areas and with commercial sized vessels. Recently on the Nancy Boucle we rose out of a deep lock and into a large basin surrounded by scrap metal processing yards with a huge crane. To give you an idea of scale the barge in the photograph is over 100 metres long.

Load me up skipper.

Further along the Moselle we encountered this 110x11m barge travelling at 12 kph. Breathe in and keep steady.

Well he was not going to move over so we had no choice.

No, we didn't get involved with the bankside vegetation but it was close. The good news, since we installed AIS (Automatic Identification System) on Soraya we can see on the dashboard computer display what is coming towards us, with size, speed, number of personnel on board etc. even what they are carrying. Just as important they can see us with all the same information, ie. 2 people, beer, lots of wine and some interesting cheeses. So they and we know who is round the next corner. Excellent.