Meeting a barge (and her blue board)

Inland conduct starts from a familiar place: keep to the starboardstarboardThe right-hand side of the boat when facing forward. Marked green.full glossary → side of the channel, meet port-to-port. Small craft — that is you — keep clear of commercial traffic almost universally; a loaded barge cannot stop, cannot leave the channel, and may need the whole bend to swing. Inland sailing has no sail-over-power romance: tonnage and channel-dependence outrank rig.

The famous exception: the BLUE BOARDblue boardA downstream barge’s request to pass starboard-to-starboard — shown with a flashing white light.full glossary →. A barge coming downstream may show a blue board with a flashing white light, asking to meet STARBOARD-to-starboard — usually to hold the inside of a bend or deeper water. Your response: show your own blue board (or make clear you understand), alter accordingly, and do not improvise a port-side dodge at the last moment. Seeing it for the first time mid-Rhine is not the moment to learn it; that is what this lesson is for.

Locks and bridges run on light signals — red for stop and wait, green for go, red-and-green combinations for “prepare” depending on the installation — plus the posted boards. The working method: arrive slow, read everything, join the queue where the small craft wait, and do exactly what the lock-keeper’s lights say rather than what the barge ahead does; barges get different instructions.

Which side of the river is red?

Inland buoyage is fixed to the BANKS, not to your direction — the sea sailor’s trap. Looking DOWNSTREAM (the direction of the current), the RIGHT bank is marked in RED (red buoys, red cones, red bank-boards and lights) and the LEFT bank in GREEN; channel-crossover and junction marks combine the colours. Travel upstream and nothing flips: the red marks now pass down your LEFT side, and you are expected to know it. First question on any new waterway, before any sign matters: which way does the river flow? On canals with no current the “downstream” direction is defined by the waterway authority — the guide tells you.

Sounds and lights, inland flavour

The inland sound vocabulary is compact and worth owning: ONE LONG blast is “attention — I am here”, sounded before blind bends, junctions, tunnel mouths and when leaving a berth; ONE SHORT means “I am altering to starboard”, TWO SHORT to portportThe left-hand side of the boat when facing forward. Marked red.full glossary →, THREE SHORT “my engines are going asternasternBehind the boat — or, of an engine, driving the boat backwards.full glossary →” — and a RAPID SERIES of short blasts is the universal “imminent danger, wake up”. The vocabulary rhymes with the sea rules deliberately, but inland it is used far more freely: expect to hear it constantly, and answer with predictable water rather than a horn battle.

Lights at night follow sea logic — sidelightssidelightsRed (port) and green (starboard) lights showing from ahead to just abaft the beam.full glossary →, sternsternThe back end of the boat.full glossary → light, masthead — with inland relaxations for genuinely small craft: on many waterways a small vessel may show an all-round white light where full lights are impractical. The working advice is one line: carry and show FULL lights anyway, because the barge bearingbearingThe direction of one thing from another, in degrees.full glossary → down at twenty kilometres an hour reads your aspect from them. And learn the special displays you will actually meet: the blue flashing light of authority vessels, and pushed convoys whose unlit barges stretch far AHEAD of the pusher’s lights — the dark water in front of the lit ship is the ship.