Route Canal

Boat/US Magazine, Nov, 2000 by Becky Squires

Extracting the Best of Inland France by Boat

Want to see Europe? There are lots of ways to do it. You could take a bus tour, travel by train or drive from city to city. Or, if you're nautically inclined, you could board a big river cruise boat.

But a better way to get the "feel" of Europe is to do it yourself on a bareboat charter. You may not see as much, but what you do see you'll be able to savor. It's also generally less expensive than eating in restaurants by day and sleeping in hotels by night, and quite a bit more comfortable.

River and canal boats are available for charter throughout Great Britain, Ireland and continental Europe, including Germany, Italy, Holland, Belgium and France. France alone has almost 4,200 miles of navigable waterways. Recently, my husband, my brother and I decided to test the French waters and rent a canal boat for 10 days. For comic relief and crew, we brought along my 11-year-old niece, Chloe, and her best friend, Bess, and chose St. Jean de Losne on the Saone River in eastern France as our destination.

You don't have to be an experienced boater to cruise the canals of Europe. Only Germany requires a captain's license. In the rest of Europe, French laissez faire is typical. The Captain's Guide given to every new charterer contains such gems as: "If you have never handled a boat before, you will be tempted to compare it with a car. There are some similarities but the differences are very important. A boat is poised on a liquid element pushed by the current and the wind."

Should you want to test the wind, the Guide further advises, "it is sufficient to put your head outside and try to judge how it [the wind] will affect the movement of the boat." We immediately assigned the head-poking-out job to my brother.

The Captain's Guide also told us that "a boat is much heavier than a car (most of our boats weigh at least 7 tons) so it can do as much damage at a relatively slow speed." True enough, but what the guide didn't say was that attaining any speed higher than five miles an hour is practically impossible on a chartered canal boat.

Our 39-foot-long, 13-foot-wide canal boat came with a 50-hp diesel engine. It also came with a governor set at 2,500 rpm. That means you'll go anywhere from 5-10 km (3.5-7 mph) under power. For sail-boaters, this is the norm, but for power-boaters accustomed to speed, the pace may take some getting used to.

However, there are so many compensations for the relatively slow pace that you quickly adjust. Our boat, the Crown Blue Line's Crusader model, was comfortable and roomy, with three cabins, each with its own head and shower, a well-equipped galley with a propane stove and oven, an electric refrigerator, a big stateroom with an inside nav station and a second nav station topsides with plenty of room up there to dine al fresco.

One reason we chose St. Jean de Losne as our base was the variety of places we could explore from there. We could go west, up the Canal de Bourgogne, to Dijon and Pont d'Ouche. We could go east to the Doubs River and the Canal du Rhone au Rhin to the German border. We could go north, up the Saone River to the foothills of the Vosges Mountains and the forests of Franche-Comte, or south on the Saone to Chalon-sur-Saone, Macon and the old boatbuilding town of Tournus.

The Crown Blue Line representative assured us that while everything was beautiful, the Saone River had 17 locks while the Canals de Bourgogne and Rhone au Rhin to the east and west had 110. Going north, the Saone was pastoral; going south was more commercial. That's all it took to convince us to take the road (or river) less traveled ... north on the Saone River.

As it turned out, those 17 locks were just enough to navigate over the next seven days. For the uninitiated, locks -- using just a gate and a simple mechanism to open and shut it -- allow you to move across the country from a low place to a high place, and back. In Europe, most of the canals were used commercially long before recreational boaters discovered them. In fact, Napoleon III standardized the sizes of the French canals and the height of the bridges that cross them during his reign in the mid-1800s.

Going through the locks was definitely a team effort, and we repeatedly blessed the 20 rubber fenders that literally circled our boat. Once you maneuver yourself into the lock -- which gets easier with practice -- someone on the boat needs to rope the bollards on the shore from the bow and the stern of the boat, and -- if it's an automatic lock -- pull the mechanism to close the gates and start the water either rising or falling. Eleven-year-olds are perfect for this. The whole process takes about 20 minutes, assuming you don't arrive at midday. From 12:30 to 2 p.m., in France and the rest of the truly civilized world, everything shuts down for lunch.

Half the locks were automatic, and the others were staffed. These lockkeepers were some of the most interesting people we met in France. Male and female, young and old, they were universally pleasant and full of good suggestions about the best places to tie up for the night. Even better, they all sold locally made wines for $2.50 to $6 a bottle, and we never met a bottle we didn't like. Fresh tomatoes and homemade honey were also on sale at many locks. While tips were not expected, the lockkeepers were glad we'd brought along a bunch of ballpoint pens with a fairly cool U.S. flag design to give away.