Nothing concentrates the mind on a Channel crossing like a 300-metre container ship that was a smudge on the horizon ten minutes ago and is now filling your windscreen. The French approaches carry some of the heaviest commercial traffic on earth, and a yacht doing six knots shares that water with ships doing twenty and unable to stop in under a couple of miles. Staying clear is not about courage or right of way. It is about understanding where the ships are funnelled, how they expect you to behave, and how you talk to the shore stations that watch them.
The two great chokepoints
Two stretches off France carry the bulk of the heavy traffic, and they are worth picturing before you ever sail near them.
The Dover Strait is the busiest shipping lane in the world. Over 400 commercial vessels use it every day, squeezed between the Kent coast and the Pas-de-Calais through a traffic separation scheme with northbound and southbound lanes. The whole thing is monitored by the Channel Navigation Information Service, run jointly by Dover Coastguard and CROSS Gris-Nez. Ships over 300 gross tonnes must report into the scheme through a system called CALDOVREP, and the monitoring stations work on VHF channel 11.
Off the western tip of Brittany, the Ushant scheme, "Off Ouessant", funnels the traffic that rounds the corner between the Atlantic and the Channel. Around 150 ships transit it daily, on the order of 5,000 in a year. It is watched by CROSS Corsen. These are the big ships taking the great-circle route to and from the rest of the world, and they are not expecting a yacht to be loitering in the lane.
If your passage takes you near either, you do not casually drift across. You plan the crossing as a deliberate act.
Crossing a separation scheme the right way
The rule that governs a yacht crossing a traffic separation scheme is unambiguous. You cross on a heading as nearly as practicable at right angles to the general direction of traffic flow. Not at right angles to your own track, which is a common and dangerous misreading: you point the boat across, accept the tide setting you sideways, and minimise the time you spend in the lane. A yacht under sail or power has no special standing here; you are crossing traffic that has every expectation of an unobstructed lane.
Cross where the lanes are narrowest if you have a choice, do it in good visibility, and do it where you can see the gaps. Time your crossing for a lull if the traffic is pulsed, which it often is around tide-gated ports. Keep a continuous lookout astern as well as ahead, because the ship that hits you is usually the one you stopped watching.
If you are planning a Channel passage in earnest, the detail of routes, timing and traffic deserves its own read, and I have set it out in the guide to crossing the English Channel by boat. For the specifics of threading between the two big western schemes, crossing the lanes at Ushant and the Casquets goes deeper than I can here.
Judging whether you will hit
The single most useful skill near shipping is the compass bearing check, and it has not changed since the days before electronics. Take a series of compass bearings to the approaching ship. If the bearing stays steady while the range closes, you are on a collision course, full stop. If the bearing draws ahead or astern, you will pass clear. A steady bearing on a ship doing twenty knots means you have minutes, not the comfortable margin your eye suggests.
AIS has transformed this, and on a busy approach it is close to essential kit. A receiver shows you the ships' names, courses and speeds, and most plotters compute the closest point of approach and the time to it. That said, AIS is an aid, not a lookout. Small craft sometimes do not transmit, fishing boats wander unpredictably, and the screen can lull you into staring down rather than out. Use it to confirm what your eyes and the bearing already tell you. If you want the visitor's view of running AIS in French coastal traffic, that is its own topic worth a look.
The other quiet danger near shipping is the one nobody mentions: a big ship throws a wash and a high-speed ferry throws a worse one, and a yacht caught beam-on to a ferry wake in light airs can roll viciously. Anticipate it, turn to take it on the bow, and warn the crew.
Talking to the ships and the shore
You will sometimes want to talk to a ship, usually to confirm it has seen you and agree who does what. Call it by name off the AIS, on channel 16, and move to a working channel. Keep it short. Ships' bridges are busy and English is the working language of the sea, so you do not need French here.
For the monitoring stations, the watchkeeping channel in the Dover Strait is 11, and CROSS Gris-Nez and Dover Coastguard split the traffic by direction. Knowing the wider picture of which French CROSS coastguard station owns which water tells you who is listening as you move along the coast. You are not obliged to report as a small craft, but you must keep a listening watch and you must stay out of the way.
If it goes wrong, near shipping is a place where it goes wrong fast, and a collision or near-miss is a genuine emergency. Keep the French distress and safety call procedure to hand so that a real problem in the middle of a busy lane gets the right call, fast.
Night and fog change the maths
By day, in good visibility, a yacht near shipping is hard but manageable. At night and in fog the difficulty multiplies, and the French approaches deliver plenty of both. A ship's lights against a backdrop of coastal lights are genuinely difficult to pick out and harder still to judge for aspect; the red, green and white that tell you which way it is heading get lost in the shore glow off a busy stretch like the Pas-de-Calais. This is where AIS stops being a luxury and a radar earns its place, because the human eye alone is not reliable against a wall of lights.
In fog the situation is worse, because now neither of you can see the other and you are both relying on instruments. A ship doing twenty knots covers a third of a mile a minute, and the closing speed between you can be such that the time from first radar contact to closest approach is only a few minutes. Slow down, make the prescribed fog signal, keep out of the lanes if you possibly can, and use every electronic aid you have. If you find yourself fogbound in heavy traffic, the safest place is often out of the shipping entirely, hove to or anchored in shallow water where the big ships cannot go. My notes on what to do if fog catches you mid-Channel go into the tactics in more detail.
A word on ferries and fast craft
The Channel ports run a relentless ferry service, and the high-speed craft are a separate hazard from the slow giants. A fast ferry closes far quicker than your eye expects, gives you less time to act, and throws a steep, fast wash that arrives after it has passed. Treat anything moving visibly faster than the rest of the traffic as a high-speed craft, give it a wide berth, and turn to take its wash on the bow rather than the beam. The cross-Channel routes out of Calais, Dunkerque and Boulogne are busy with them, and a yacht crossing those approaches needs to factor the ferries in alongside the cargo traffic.
The habits that keep you alive
Near commercial traffic I run a tighter ship than anywhere else. I keep a proper lookout, with someone always watching out rather than down at the screen. I take bearings on anything that might converge. I cross schemes at right angles to the flow and never dawdle in a lane. I keep channel 16 on and the monitoring channel selected. And I treat every ship as if its bridge cannot see me, because at night, in a seaway, against a coastline of lights, it very often cannot. The ships are not the enemy. They are simply big, fast and unable to avoid you, which means the avoiding is entirely your job.
