Testing The Waters

Thinking about taking your boat to France? It’s worthwhile exploring its waterways and lifestyle first – and a trip makes a great break.

- Steve Haywood

The incentive for most people deciding to holiday on a boat in France is the promise of dependably hot summer days, of chilled white wine on the deck and lunches in little red-roofed villages tucked among vineyards. What determined it for me was something entirely different: it was my knee.

I’d woken up one morning with a fully-fledged cartilage problem that immobilised me so much I hadn’t been able to set foot on a boat in months. I was getting withdrawal symptoms. As I wrote in one of my Canal Boat columns, what I’d started to fantasise about was a waterway with no locks, yet one wide enough to accommodate large craft so I could requisition a crew who could carry me off the boat every now and again to a pub where I could be comforted by limitless supplies of analgesic. You know the sort: it generally comes in pint or half-pint glasses.

Then somebody suggested France. Okay, there are no pubs in France – but there are enough bars. And though there are locks, there are also lock-keepers to operate them for you. The idea of France touched a chord with Moira and me because, like Aileen and Mike Queenan who have just written about doing it in the last two issues of this magazine, we’ve been thinking about taking our boat to France for years. Now it looked as if my crocked knee might give us the opportunity for a scouting mission.

Of course, the first decision for hiring in France is where to do it from. The extensive French waterway system is, roughly speaking, split into two. Most navigable rivers and canals are in the centre and north; the rest, separated by more than 400 kilometres of the sometimes treacherous River Rhone, comprise the River Garonne and the Canal du Midi, which together link the Mediterranean to the Bay of Biscay.