SAILING SWIFT ~ The French Canals, Part 1 by Morgan Finley

(Morgan and Melanie, and their daughters Isla (12) and Pippa (9), are from Victoria, Canada and have sailing in their blood. They spent years researching what boat would suit them for long-term cruising, eventually settling on the 1990s version of the Moody 44, a centre-cockpit design with a practical layout and solid build and finish. Having found one for sale in the UK, the purchase went through in November 2019 and they named her Swift. They had their eye on spring departure so hastily renovated, packed and rented out their Canadian home, but had a slow start from the UK due to COVID-19 lockdowns.

They share pictures on Instagram @sailing.swift and have a blog at https://www.sailblogs. com/member/sailingswift/ which they update from time to time).

Decisions

It’s 5.30am and we’ve already been in Cherbourg, France for a week. It looks like it may be the best day for the next week to make a 90-mile run southwest, but the wind is still blowing 15 knots and will be right on the nose. The Channel Islands are still closed due to COVID-19 travel restrictions so we can’t shorten our day. We’re up early so we can catch a lift from the huge currents in the Alderney Race, but there’s no excitement for this morning’s adventure. We know Pippa will suffer from mal de mer, and I’m suffering from mal de biere. What are we doing? We hate beating to weather. We’ve heard the French canals are open again ... Paris, vineyards, pastoral countryside, no slogging to windward and no crossing the Bay of Biscay? The decision is obvious, so next day the wind is at our backs as we slip eastward. A week later we’ve pulled the mast in Le Havre and arrive in beautiful Honfleur at the mouth of the River Seine. We aren’t going into this completely blind. We had planned to use the French waterways to reach the Mediterranean when we found a Moody 44 in the UK with a shallow draft of 1∙5m. However, the spring COVID-19 lockdown in the UK derailed our itinerary, and the

Isla, Pippa, Melanie and Morgan passing the Eiffel Tower

uncertainties from a slowlyreopening Europe suggested we might be better going across the Bay of Biscay. We had also planned to make this trip in May when, historically, the water levels in the canals are higher and the traffic lighter. It’s now 8th July and, although we can still picture the worst with Swift grounding in a drying canal until the autumn rains, we are also very excited to be finally heading in the right direction and going somewhere we really want to go!

Within the first 30 minutes we and two other yachts run aground at low tide outside the Honfleur lock. I hang my head in shame – at least it is soft mud. Swift has the shallowest draft and we are soon off to catch the tidal

Pippa showing off her gymnastic skills to walk the mast

surge for the run up the River Seine to Rouen. We pass medium-sized freighters and dockyards, but also long stretches of muddy banks with riverside vegetation and very little else. The first lock is 40km past Rouen. It’s huge – sized to accommodate commercial barge traffic. Our first transit is near disaster because we have moored far up the lock, nearest to the turbulence from the flooding process. We swing all over and the mast comes in close to the wall. We emerge shaken but unscathed, and moor for the night at a quiet wall by a sleepy neighbourhood. A friendly canal traveller provides advice for future lock transits. We celebrate our successes and look forward to tomorrow.

Château Gaillard, built by Richard the Lionheart in Les Andelys overlooking the Seine

Paris and beyond

The next morning is amazing. We are up early and mist swirls over the river as we motor on our way. The remainder of our run to Paris is a transition from the lowlands of the

Sunrise on the River Seine

Seine estuary to a more scenic landscape with farmland, pretty villages and even the occasional castle. We transit the locks without mishap and with much less stress. We reach Paris on 12th July, two days before Bastille Day. It is surreal to arrive in one of the more beautiful and vibrant cities in the world on your own boat. You motor right past the Eiffel Tower – so very impressive and very huge! We motor under spectacular bridges and past an eclectic mix of canal barge conversions, and eventually moor in the Arsenal Marina basin near the foot of the Bastille monument.

Our experiences of Paris and the Bastille Day celebrations are ones of social distancing but are nonetheless great. We walk or rent electric scooters. We visit the Eiffel Tower but don’t go up. We see the Louvre but only from the outside. We eat ice cream near the fire-gutted Notre Dame Cathedral. We drink French

Passing under the bridges of Paris

beer outside Parisian brasseries. We stumble across military horse guards and their accompanying band, who parade unannounced through the streets to avoid drawing a crowd. Our view of the fireworks is distant, but how great is it to be sitting on the banks of the River Seine listening to musicians and the chatter of groups of friends enjoying a few beverages? Paris doesn’t disappoint and was one of the adventures that Isla was most looking forward to.

Our only negative to date – and it is certainly enough to dampen our enthusiasm for our waterway adventure – results from meeting another sailing boat, the first and only one we see. They are on their way back to the English Channel having encountered excessive weed on their chosen route south of Paris. We spend an extra day in Paris trying to get answers from the Voies Navigables de France (VNF), the agency responsible for the waterway system in France. Due to our draft there is only the one route through France available to us, and they confirm there are weeds but that it is open for now. For now? That sounds ominous, but we decide to push on.

The Renommee des Arts statue which flanks Pont Alexandre III

Bastille Day military parade

We depart Paris nice and early and head west along the Marne River Chalifert tunnel, between system. On the first day Paris and Meaux we get to take our oceangoing sailboat through two tunnels. They are narrow and low, but we get a rush out of the novelty. That night we arrive in the city of Meaux, where there is an excellent Halte Nautique (a public stopover) with pontoons for a dozen boats. We have one neighbour and the cost to moor is only 10€ including power and water. The town is pretty, and the kids stay on board while we sneak off to drink a couple of beers in the town square at a vibrant little bar. Our journey continues down the Marne and the scenery transitions to hillsides covered in vines. We tie up beside cornfields in the middle of nowhere and the swimming is great, as are the views. We stay up in the cockpit until well past dark enjoying the peace and beauty of the French countryside.

Leaving Chalifert tunnel astern

Loving life in the canals

We continue on through the Champagne region, where we stumble upon a Champagne tasting room and leave with a few more bottles for the bilge. We are loving it! This is exactly what we wanted. This stretch of the Marne is really beautiful, with lots of interesting stopping places and friendly people. The river is clean and provides some excellent swimming breaks, and the weather warm and sunny. Aside from the regret that comes from eating my body weight in cheese and consuming the same in wine on a daily basis, we are feeling pretty good.

We continue on through the Canal Latéral à la Marne and start to encounter more weed. The canal narrows and the locks are sized down accordingly. It is possible to push through the weed, but the size of the floating rafts at the entrance to some of the locks is concerning. We start emptying our raw-water strainer every morning. Two days later we enter the outskirts of the city of Vitry-le-François and don’t feel the love for canal life anymore. The canal is a narrow, dirty ditch past ageing industrial buildings, weeds choke the edges and I skim past a shopping cart. We turn past the boat harbour we originally thought we might stop at. There are a few small commercial barges and some pleasure craft, but most look like they got this far only to die a slow, rusting death. A barge pumps dirty brown bilge water into the canal in front of us – no swimming here! The entrance into the first lock of the Canal entre Champagne et Bourgogne is no better. It is under a train staging area which makes a low, flat-ceilinged tunnel with nowhere to wait and no room to manoeuvre. Finally the gate opens and we squeeze in. It’s a taller lock than any we’ve had in a while, making it feel even more tight, but up we go and the sunlight is shining on us again. The lockkeeper is friendly and hands us a remote to operate the locks. He also informs us that the weed isn’t bad and the water levels are okay. We leave the lock feeling as if we just won a prize – things are looking up!

Swift in a narrow lock surrounded by weed

The Race to the Top

It is 23rd July, day 14, and we are only a couple of kilometres, locks and nights into the Canal entre Champagne et Bourgogne. The free shower is a really nice start to the day, but I walk back to Swift to receive terrible news from Mel – the VNF is closing this canal in six days and it has been allowed to drain overnight, bringing the minimum depth down to 1 ∙ 6m. We have 210km to go and over 120 locks, and our draught of 1∙5m is now very close to the new levels. We’ve also heard that weed continues to be an issue. We start to panic and call the VNF immediately. This is the only route that will get our boat through France to the Med, but we are so far in that we are determined not to return to the English Channel.

The start of our trek is pretty weedy but we push on and water levels seem fine. Our lock transits become more streamlined as we fall into a routine. The remote has a button to open the lock gates and, once inside, Pippa goes up the slimy ladder or gets boosted over the top to catch lines, Isla fends off the opposite side and then tends the stern line, Mel tosses the bow line and runs around assisting, and I manage the spring and the bow line, sometimes from the deck and sometimes from the top depending on bollard placement. Entry into each lock is tight, with about 8 inches each side if I get it perfect, so we go in under low revs or let our momentum carry us. When there is no weed the bow-thruster helps with final manoeuvres. Just like when we enter the lock, our remote has a button to fill it and the lock exit sequence is otherwise automatic.

We are still a couple of hours from St Dizier when Mel gets hold of VNF who confirm that the canal is closing and tell us to move quickly. The sun is relentless. We’ve taken down the awning so we can better transit the locks which come every couple of kilometres. Twice we cool off in the cleaner-looking canal sections. It is too narrow to stop the boat, so we take turns hanging, superman-style, off the stern ladder while Swift glides down the canal in neutral so we can maintain steerage.

Isla and Pippa ready to handle lines in a lock

St Dizier is unappealing as a stopping place and leaves us too much distance still to go, so we head for Joinville with two potential mooring spots. By 5pm we are tired and worn out by the locks and the sun, but we still have 15km and five locks to go – at least two hours. Pleasure boat traffic is supposed to tie up from 6pm, in contrast to commercial traffic which can continue for another hour, but we suspect that we can use our remote to keep going after 6pm, especially because there is no commercial traffic this year. We push the boat speed up above the 6 knot speed limit and speed up our lock entrances and exits as much as we can. The countdown to 7pm continues and there is nowhere to stop. At 6.25 we still have two locks to go; by the time we exit the second to last lock it is 6.42 and it is 2km to the next. If we trigger the lock sequence before 7pm we figure it has to run the full cycle? At 6.52 the lock is in sight and Mel is pushing the button trying to start the sequence. It flicks to red and green meaning it is preparing for us. We are in the lock by 6.57 and, thankfully, it fills and then lets us out again! We are in the clear ... except the first mooring place is much too shallow and has a private barge on it. The second has room but, as we ease towards it angling the bow in, we run aground. We are about a metre away, which is just within jumping distance.

We need to re-provision so I grab my wallet and phone and run up to try and find the store that is apparently open until 7.30. At 7.29 I find it and they let me in despite having no mask. I grab random fresh vegetables, some bread, meat, even a pack of beer, only to realise I don’t have a bag and they don’t supply them. I walk back to the boat juggling carrots and the rest. The kids are having a celebration chocolate. We are pretty happy with our progress. It was a long, very long, but more or less manageable day.

Day 15, 24th July. I am up way too early, concerned about water levels. We could see the evidence of the draw-down when we arrived last night, and I’m very worried they will continue to draw-down and our situation of being gently aground will become a whole lot harder. My fears are unfounded but by 6.45 everyone is up, the girls drinking sweet tea and eating cookies. Our day starts at 7am when commercial traffic could get going in a normal year. We are congratulating ourselves on being able to push through – the depths are low, only reading 0∙2 to 0∙4m under the keel and the weed is bad at times, but we haven’t faltered. Then, two hours into our morning, we hit the worst stretch yet. Farmland stretches away on either side, no trees line the edge of the canal, it is hot, and the weed is thick with only a narrow ribbon of water where the mats of weed don’t choke the surface. The edges are fresh mud from the draw-down and the depth drops to 0∙1 and then 0∙0m under the keel. We watch the speed slow from 4∙4 knots to 3∙5 and then 2∙8 – we are crawling along. There is hardly any water in the canal. We look at each other, thinking that we can’t go on if it’s like this the whole way. But there is nowhere to turn around – the width of the canal is much less than the length of the boat. How long will it be until the autumn rains float us again if we get stuck? A frog swims beside us. I eye up its legs, contemplating their potential as a protein source. We think that one of the nearby fields is growing sugar beets – can you eat sugar beets? We are also the cork in the bottle. If we stick here no one else will get through either. Stress – you bet!

At which moment of high drama we must leave Swift and her crew –rejoin them in Flying Fish 2021/2.