Cruising French Canals On A Sailboat! (Part 1/2) [Ep 4]

Welcome to Sailing Magic Carpet. In this episode we leave Switzerland and float down the river to France to start our two-week journey through the canals and rivers to the Mediterranean Sea. I've been looking forward to this part of the journey for almost a year. The idea of small little canals winding through French countryside, waking up to visit a boulangerie in the morning and drinking red wine from local vineyards in the evening seemed like a beautiful way to live life. And honestly, it is. Before leaving Basel we did a few last-minute preparations, welcomed Aladino's friends Malte and Lena on board and said goodbye to the amazing Noel and Harissa. Once we left the dock the current from the Rhine river carried us swiftly along towards the start of our journey. The distance from Basel, Switzerland to Port Saint-Louis in France where we will enter the Mediterranean Sea is about 800 kilometers. In a car you can do that in one long day but with a sailboat in the canals it takes two weeks of motoring all day every day. First of all, that's because we're slow. We can literally run faster than Magic Carpet moves. But second of all, it's because we have to travel through 130 locks on our way to the sea. Locks are basically like water elevators. You motor inside some big watertight gates close behind you. The water level rises or falls depending on which direction you're going and then the gates in front of you open and you continue your journey. As the water level changes you have to constantly adjust the length of the ropes holding your boat to the side of the lock. To do that you just loop your rope around a cleat on shore and then hold on to the other end to gradually adjust its length. That means that you always need line handlers on deck when you're in a lock. For a small boat like ours locks are no problem. It's a good idea to stay more or less in the middle of the lock since when the water pours in it can create a bit of a stir. But other than that they're pretty straightforward. For a larger boat they're still not too bad although you do have to be careful to steer the boat incorrectly because some canal boats are built exactly as wide as the locks are. Now they are approaching. Approaching! I tell you oh my okay all good well that was anticlimactic. Locks do slow down your progress a lot because it usually takes at least 10 to 20 minutes to pass through one. Sometimes we go through about 25 locks a day so that's a lot of time spent waiting for the water level to change. The first lock we entered was in the river Rhine. That was actually the largest lock we've been through so far designed to accommodate large commercial canal boats. After that we motored down a little bit more of the Rhine before entering France and a system of tiny little canals which were built in the late 1800s. For the first part of the canal journey there's a lock operator who follows you from lock to lock to catch your lines and operate the lock for you. That was quite a nice experience since some of the operators were very friendly and it meant that the lock was always prepared for you so you didn't have to wait outside of it. At one part of the journey somewhere in between the villages of Danemarie and Montpellier we literally went up a water staircase. There was just lock after lock after lock one after the other. At the end you could look down and see the elevation you'd gained. What an odd thing to experience while standing on the deck of a sailboat but after the tedium of so many locks we were rewarded with some beautiful woodland scenery. Malta took out his fishing rod and we cruised at an idle speed through lush forests swooping down to brush against the water's surface. I read my book, prepared some lunch and listened to some nice music. Nothing is so peaceful as the combination of a beautiful sailboat on still water and the sweet smelling air of a lush green forest and it's definitely not a combination you get too often. Today we just left Montpellier and we are aiming to motor for as long as possible before tying up again somewhere this evening. I'm very happy because we bought a computer charger that works with the boat's 12 volt electrical system and so far it's doing its job which means I can edit videos on the go. In the next episode we'll continue our journey along the French canals sharing little stories as we go. If there are specific parts of the journey that you're interested in let me know and I'll try to include more of that in the next episode. Au revoir!