We spent several years as a barge handling school, loosely based in Cambrai on the Canal St. Quentin in N. France. Cambrai is pretty much the first town a newcomer from the UK arrives at where there is a safe mooring, somewhere for new bargees to catch their breath. They’ve crossed the Channel with their new boat, either by sea or on the back of a lorry, and the adventure is begun. Those with previous UK canal experience suddenly find the waterways and locks rather different - locks are 140m x 12.5m and they are sharing them with commercial vessels. Those with yachting background find themselves having to work to tighter limits - instead of just making landfall at the end of their cruise they are effectively  in contact with the land and putting lines ashore at each lock. Added to this is that their new boat is probably a lot larger and heavier than what they have been used to and they are a bit frightened of it and of the possibility of damaging their new home.

I’ve already made comment on the Safety and Man Overboard pages to the effect that where a couple is concerned it is most commonly the man who steers and the woman acts as crew. Also, and again commonly, it is the man who attends a course to get the necessary helmsman’s certificate and his partner is expected to pick up all she needs to know in situ. Taking all this into account it is not surprising that Cambrai was the place where for a few couples the dream ended. For some of these the dream was totally ill-conceived in the first place, but for others it was just that they had not prepared themselves adequately.

The job of crew encompasses a wide range of tasks, but most significantly for inland boating it involves a lot of rope handling. If you look at a couple working a commercial freight barge when they come into a lock you will mostly see the wife steering the boat in and the husband on the fore-end putting a line on. Rope work is serious business; there is always potential for accident, and the professionals generally prefer that it is the man who manages the line in a lock. For these novices though it is most always the wife who is acting as crew, and mostly untrained.

Remember my adage in the Safety page - accidents rarely happen to the helmsman in the wheelhouse. We were on one barge where the helmsman went through a detailed 3 or 4 page safety check list each day before even starting his engine; he read out each item and his wife was expected to say it back to him as if she was a Naval rating. The list went into great detail - “Switch on radio”, “Switch on radio” (tick), but his crew - his wife - was expected to somehow duck under projections and crawl around lots of unnecessary stuff at the fore end each time she was trying to put lines on lockside bollards and tend them. If he’d had to do the ropework himself I suspect things would soon have changed - hopefully they did change after our comment anyway. We’ve also heard helmsmen shouting at their partner to jump off the fore end with a line as they come in to moor when you’d have to be an olympic long-jumper to stand any chance of reaching the bank. Their apparent lack of concern gives the impression that the safety of crew/wives is of little consequence.

I said earlier that it is very important with couples that both people can handle the barge, and that means crewing as well as steering. Some couples are happier with the captain making all the decisions while others work more as a team, but however it is done, at the end of the day one person has to be in charge and that will ordinarily be the helmsman (whoever that might be at the time). One crucial requirement is that any commands be clear and unambiguous. Some use walkie-talkies to communicate between wheelhouse and crew, but I don’t like this as it means the crew’s actions are limited by one hand holding the unit. Many use hand signals, but one risk is they can be misinterpreted or even unseen, perhaps due to glare from the sun. On Friesland we have a 2-way intercom - the crew simply speaks towards the speaker horn at the bow to communicate with the wheelhouse. This is a marine unit which also has the capability of sounding a foghorn at 1 minute intervals which has proved useful on occasion.

As Di tells trainee crew persons, a good crew can make a bad helmsman look good while poor crew can make even a good helmsman look bad. Come in to a difficult mooring with a wind trying to blow you about; if the crew lobs the eye of the line immediately onto an appropriate bollard you drive in against that and everything looks brilliant, but if they miss with the eye the wind catches you and you spend ages pfaffing about before you can make another approach to try again. Much the same too when you need to come neatly into a busy lock.

To finish with a couple of things concerning crew safety, firstly it is crucial to avoid stepping on line on the deck as it tends to roll under the foot and cause you to lose balance. Also to avoid standing within a coil of rope - we do know of one person having a really nasty accident when she did this and the coil then tightened around her leg. Lines are very important items of equipment and should be recoiled ready for use as soon as they are finished with, not left in a tangled mess on the deck where they are a hazard and no use to man nor beast.

Finally is gloves. Some commercial boat people do wear them, but they wear stiff industrial ones not soft ones. They are also dealing with much heavier lines than a leisure barge uses, even sometimes steel cables when they are loaded. The danger with soft and loose gloves is that they can get caught up in the line as it pays out and the fingers can get caught between the line and the bollard, causing serious damage. We’ve never worn gloves ourselves and don’t allow others to wear them on Friesland.

link to Tam’s RYA Book of CEVNI Regulations and DVD Barge Handling in France

(All text and photographs copyright

© Tam & Di Murrell unless otherwise credited)