Plenty of visiting crews arrive in France knowing only one French VHF habit: monitor 16 and hope. That gets you through a lifetime of day sailing without ever calling a marina, but it leaves you guessing the first time you need a lock to open or a fuel berth confirmed. The channel plan in France follows the international allocations, so most of it will already be familiar, but the way ports, marinas and locks use those channels has local quirks worth knowing before you need them.
Here is the working channel list I keep taped by the chart table, and the logic behind it.
The channels you must never get wrong
Channel 16, on 156.8 MHz, is distress, urgency, safety and initial calling. The coastguard, CROSS, keeps a continuous watch on it. You raise distress here, you make your first contact with another station here, and then you move off to a working channel to keep 16 clear. Treat it as sacred and keep needless chatter off it.
Channel 70 is the Digital Selective Calling channel. You do not talk on 70, your radio uses it automatically in the background to send DSC alerts, including the one-button distress alert that carries your MMSI and position. Never use 70 for voice.
If those two are second nature, the rest is just knowing who lives on which channel.
Marinas and harbour offices
Most French marinas work on channel 9. You call the capitainerie (the harbour office) on 9 to ask for a visitor berth, confirm depth, or get directions in. It is the single most useful channel to a visitor after 16, and in busy season it is how you find out whether there is room before you commit to an entrance. Some larger or commercial ports use a different working channel, and a handful use 12, so check the pilot or almanac entry for the specific port. The principle holds though: call on the listed working channel, not on 16, unless the almanac tells you otherwise.
A word on etiquette, because the radio is also how you make a first impression. Keep the call short, give the marina name, your boat name and that you are a visitor, and they will tell you where to go. The wider business of arriving at a French marina, fees and procedures is covered in the article on how French marinas work for visitors.
Ports, locks and tidal basins
This is where France will catch you out if you are used to open marinas. Many French harbours, especially in the tidal north, sit behind a lock or a sill that only opens around high water, and getting in means talking to the port on its traffic channel. Channel 12 is widely used for port traffic and lock control: it is the channel for the commercial port and lock at Saint-Malo, for example. Other ports use channels in the same family, so again, read the entry for your destination.
The drill is simple but unforgiving on timing. You call the lock or port control on its channel as you approach, you ask for entry, and you do what you are told, in the order you are told, because there may be a ship coming the other way and you are the small boat. If you are new to French locks, the mechanics of working through one are explained in how a French lock works, and the canal world has its own channel conventions covered in the inland waterways guides.
The inland canals add another layer. Many lock systems, including stretches of the Rhone, operate on their own VHF channels rather than 12, and these have changed in recent years, so an old almanac will mislead you. On the canals you are as likely to use a phone or a presence detector as the radio, but where VHF is required the lock-keeper's channel is posted at the lock.
Ship-to-ship
When you want to talk to another small craft, or to a ship to agree a passing, you use the inter-ship channels: 6, 8, 72 and 77 are the common ones. Channel 6 has a primary role in search and rescue coordination on scene, so keep that one for when it matters rather than for chatting. For arranging a rendezvous with a buddy boat, 72 and 77 are the usual picks. Agreeing a pass with a coaster in a narrow channel is a legitimate and sensible use of ship-to-ship VHF, and far better than guessing each other's intentions.
Traffic separation schemes and big-ship areas
France borders some of the busiest water on earth. The Dover Strait scheme is watched by CROSS Gris-Nez, the Casquets scheme by CROSS Jobourg, and the Ushant scheme off Brittany by CROSS Corsen. As a small craft you are not required to report into these the way a merchant ship is, but you should be monitoring 16, and you should know that the coastguard is actively watching the lane and will broadcast warnings about rogue traffic, vessels not under command and the like. If you are crossing a scheme, the safe-crossing rules and the radio context are set out in the piece on the Dover Strait traffic separation scheme for small craft.
A radio check, and why it matters more abroad
When you arrive in a new area it pays to confirm your set is actually getting out, and France is no different. The polite way is to ask another small craft on a ship-to-ship channel, or to use a working channel for a routine radio check rather than cluttering 16. Hearing a clear reply from a station a few miles off tells you your aerial, your power and your squelch are all doing their job before you are relying on them in earnest. I do this on the first morning in any new cruising ground, because a masthead aerial connection that worked all last season has a habit of corroding quietly over a winter ashore.
If you carry DSC, run the built-in DSC test too. It confirms the digital side is alive without troubling anyone on voice, and it is the function you will be leaning on hardest if things go wrong, since the one-button alert sends your MMSI and position to CROSS faster than you can speak. The licensing and MMSI side of all this for visiting boats is set out in VHF licence, DSC and MMSI in France.
The coastguard weather and safety slots
CROSS uses VHF for more than emergencies. The stations broadcast Meteo-France weather bulletins and navigational warnings at fixed times. The pattern is consistent: an announcement on channel 16, then the actual bulletin on a working channel, commonly 79 or 80. The coastal bulletins go out around three times a day, with extra summer broadcasts from the western stations. The broadcasts are in French, so to use them you want the structure and vocabulary from understanding the French coastal forecast, and the full picture of which station broadcasts where is in CROSS and the French coastguard.
Putting it together
You do not need to memorise the whole band plan. You need a short list: 16 for distress and first calls, 70 for DSC in the background, 9 for marinas, 12 for ports and locks, 6, 8, 72 and 77 for ship-to-ship, and 79 or 80 for the coastguard weather broadcasts. Pin that by the radio, then read the almanac entry for each port you visit, because the local working channel is the one detail that genuinely varies and the one a wrong guess will cost you at the harbour mouth. Get the channel right and the rest of the conversation, even in French, tends to look after itself, which is exactly why the next thing worth learning is the VHF phrases that matter in France.
