Maritime Seine

We were pleasantly surprised at how picturesque the lower or Maritime Seine is/was. Once you clear the industrial suburbs of Rouen there is lots of green and lots of beautiful houses some big some small, it was a surprisingly enjoyable journey. We left Rouen at 7am and moored up in Honfleur 10hours later. We’d completed almost all of the journey in 9hours but we were going to miss the lock by minutes so had to throttle back and cruise the last few miles on tick over at 5knots, current assisted and this was even having left at the wrong state of tide. We left Rouen 2hours after high tide so had weaker upriver current with us but would be pushing against it down stream before it turned and was with us at the end. I think all the recent rain helped to restrict the power of the ‘against us’ current, it only ran for 3hours and only reduced our speed to 4knots on average. When the tide turned and was with us we reached our maximum speed of 10.5knots. We had debated waiting a few more days for what should had been more favourable currents but we were both really keen to leave Rouen behind us. On this trip we saw our first functioning river cruise boat, all the others,about 35 in total, have been moored up and mothballed.
Honfleur is another very pretty historic town with lots and lots of galleries, restaurants and tourist shops. There were also a lot of visitors, it felt busier than Paris. Masks had to be worn in the town centre both in inside and outside spaces, conditions are getting stricter.Read more