Chapter 29: Speed Boat

Alright, Rachel and I wanted to know what it’s like to live on a boat. Europe has 20,000 miles of navigable inland waterways, so we rented a canal boat to check out the Alsace region of France, near the border with Germany.

We took a train and spent a few days in Strasbourg and Saverne, waiting for our boat rental, and discovered that we really enjoy this region as combining the best parts of French and German culture. While German sausages and potatoes are always on the menu, French cuisine is featured as well, saving us from a Munich situation last year in which potatoes protruded from our ears after a week on the unvaried diet.

The cities are beautiful and friendly, with a mix of French and German architecture and culture.

A heat wave blasted through the region on the day we picked up our 31-foot Penichette Evolution from Locaboat, bringing temperatures into the high-90s. We went through the short training sequence and spent the evening semi-comfortably tied up in the shade at their headquarters alongside all the other Saturday check-ins (with a few cold beverages, of course).

The next morning, we pushed off.

I hammered the throttle to find out the top speed, and my console read 5.5 miles per hour. Much of the canal had a 4 mph speed limit; we were often passed by slow joggers on the adjacent footpath, but dispatched walkers with ease (until the next lock).

Ninety percent of the stress of canal boating comes from locking. Locks are what keep placid canals from becoming swift-flowing rivers, but the process of locking up or down takes coordination and communication, especially with only two people in the boat.

Locking up can be difficult – water rushing into the lock causes the boats to swing violently, especially if you’re an inexperienced captain who’s only been driving this thing for six minutes, and you tie up loosely, too far forward, and there’s another boat right behind you, and your boat shoots forward and backward on the surging water, and the other boat yells at you in posh British accents, and you grab the lines to hold steady and it saws the damn skin right off your fingers.

Or so I’ve heard.

Locking down is easier. The water drains calmly out of the lock, and the boat descends like a feather dropped on a windless day. This is me about to lock down by yanking the blue pole to empty the full lock we’re sitting in.

One famous feature of the western route we chose was the Arzviller inclined plane, which raises or lowers boats 150 vertical feet in one fell swoop, replacing the original series of 17 sequential locks which took a full day to navigate. The plane consists of a giant “bathtub”, holding two or three boats at a time, which is then put into motion by a huge set of counterweights.

It’s a tourist attraction – people drive into the middle of rural France just to watch this thing go up and down.

Immediately after the Arzviller lift, we came to a sequence of narrow, dark, dripping tunnels.

We had made friends with the Brits who we almost rammed in the first lock, and I stared in disbelief when they told us it would take 30 minutes to navigate through the first one. But, yep, it did. That’s life at 3 mph.

As I was the driver of the boat, sitting in the flybridge up top, Rachel was tasked with virtually all of the other chores like handling lines, managing the locks, and hammering stakes whenever there were no fixed bollards to tie up to.

Immediately after getting settled here, we saw a battalion of ants attempting to colonize our boat via the long grasses bridging the water gap. We set to work pulling and cutting away the weeds, wishing we’d brought gloves.

We tied up late on our first evening, in the middle of nowhere, exhausted, but content to eat sandwiches and watch the sunset over a hay field.

A few days later we had the opportunity to go through the Réchicourt “deep lock”, a 50-footer.

These German ladies in front of us actually broke down in the next lock, blocking us in and obstructing the lock until enough angry waiting boaters came over and towed them out with their lines, everyone shouting in German and French and English.

It definitely wasn’t not entertaining. We had previously offered to tow them out but got the cold shoulder, so some schadenfreude was involved in this culmination.

The temperature cooled slightly throughout the week, but Lily still doesn’t handle heat very well, and there’s no air conditioning on the boat. Rachel’s solution involved cooling a neck gaiter and sponge in the freezer, then sticking the sponge in Lily’s harness and swaddling the neck gaiter around her like a tube top. I hear this look is hitting the Parisian runways in the fall.

And so we spent seven days slowly drifting through rural France, seeing small towns and big cows and old churches, ordering cappuccinos and pastries at small boulangeries in our terrible French.

We had rented two bicycles, strapped to the rear deck, which we pedaled into nearby towns for supplies. You haven’t lived until you’ve piloted a bald-tired squeaky-seated beach cruiser uphill on a rutted gravel road, its cracked plastic basket overloaded with ten liters of water, a few bottles of cheap prosecco, and a six-pack of beer.

One non-enjoyable aspect of this life was hammered home immediately during our boat orientation, when our guide showed us how to empty our sewer tanks directly into the canal. For this reason, we (and most other boaters) decided not to swim in the canal, however tempting it may appear on a sunny breezeless 95-degree day.

Some intrepid stag parties did not heed the conventional wisdom, whooping it up as they jumped from their flybridge into the calm brown water. I wondered intensely what their reaction would be if they ever doggy-paddled their noses into a nice juicy clump of toilet paper, but sadly never had the occasion to find out.

We were puttering slowly late one afternoon, looking for a place to tie up for the night, when we passed by a humongous dead catfish, easily three feet long, filling the air with its stench. It was bloated and grey and twisted and generally one of the most unpleasant creatures I’d ever seen or smelled.

A mile further, we stopped and tied up at a gorgeous, peaceful embankment. We relaxed, cooked supper, and watched the beautiful sunset.

But there in the photo – see it? – the catfish reared its ugly head. Unbeknownst to us, there was a very slight current, the speed of an arthritic tortoise, gradually bringing the distended corpse nearer and nearer. We watched a few episodes of Scrubs, pausing periodically to check on the fish’s status as it drew near. We were already tied up and settled for the night, and didn’t want to move, so we could only stare as its progression. And we began to smell it.

It reached our boat just after nightfall, heading squarely for the center of our stern. It came close enough for me to prod it with a pole, gagging at the give of its soft flesh, and Rachel held a flashlight as I steered it alongside and past our boat. It sluggishly drifted away, and we gave thanks that we’d noticed it coming and didn’t wake up in the middle of the night to the unimaginable smell of it lodged up under our boat.

Seven days later, we were seasoned boating people. We’d seen things. We were sunburned and dirty, calloused and sore. We were unfazed by tricky locks or side currents or slippery lines. We turned up our noses at the new crowd of Saturday check-ins, pale and innocent, lambs heading to slaughter.

Our week on the boat had reinforced that we were interested in the general lifestyle, albeit only in a situation where we could jump into the water without fear of contracting pinkeye. Ocean sailing was the next logical conclusion. We had booked two weeks in Austria to recover in cooler weather, and set our sights on Greece after that.

We turned in our boat, sheepishly reimbursed them 25 Euro for one bike lock now resting somewhere at the bottom of the canal, rewarded ourselves with pastries and cappuccinos, and jumped aboard a train to Austria.