Tight squeeze: narrow tunnels
like this 2.3km Billy Tunnel would
prove to be a real challenge for the
Walker’s beamy 56ft trawler yachtT
he shoulder-shrugging French lock-keeper
speaking with just a soupçon of Inspector
Clouseau’s accent had a point. “Monsieur, your
bateau is too aiy to go under zee bridge. You
have to go back.”
From where I’m standing on the fl ybridge
of our 56-foot steel trawler yacht Nomade, there
defi nitely looked to be no way in a month
of Sundays that its 11.1 foot high upper extremities would shimmy
under the supposedly 11 foot high bridge at the lock entrance.
We were in the sweet French village of Thaon les Vosges, in the
Lorraine region of north-eastern France, miles from civilisation.
And we were stuck.
Before we’d set off on this grand adventure, heading from the English
Channel to the Med using the labyrinth of French canals and rivers,
we’d been warned that Nomade might be just too vertically-challenged
to squeeze beneath some of the notoriously low bridges of France’s
Napoleonic-era – that’s shorthand for crumbling – canal system.
Fellow navigators we’d met along the way had told us not to try.
One did give us a piece of sage advice: “If you get stuck, head to the
nearest bar, and offer a round of pastis for the locals to come and sit
on your boat.” His reasoning; the more rotund, warm bodies we
could entice on board – amply-bottomed French farmers’ wives
being the preferred bodies of choice – the lower in the water we’d go.
Others suggested we should do what the French commercial barge
captains do when their wheelhouses are a shade too lofty. Get within
a couple of feet of the masonry and hit the throttle. In theory the
props would suck the water out from under the bridge, the stern
would drop and you could squeeze under.
For me, that would be like jumping into a Lamborghini for the
fi rst time and aiming for a set of steel width restrictors at 200mph in
the hopes it would squeeze through. Yep, it could work, but boy
would it make a mess if things went wrong.
As I stood on the fl ybridge scratching my chin at this seemingly
irresolvable situation, I refl ected on what had led to us being here.
PLOTTING A PATH SOUTH
There are three ways of moving 39 tonnes of Dutch-built steel
trawler yacht from dreary northern Europe to the sunny Côte
d’Azur, where our plan was to spend a sun-kissed summer quaffi ng
chilled rosé and munching moules.
The easiest? Call up Lorries-R-Us to hire an 18-wheeler, book a
crane and simply truck it the 760-odd miles south to the Med. Okay, it
would require us writing a cheque for a non-trivial ten grand. But on
the plus side, it would take four days max, instead of four months plus.
Alternative Number Two would be to go around the outside. It’s
the preferred route for most boats our size. Down the Channel, out
around western France, across the frisky Bay of Biscay, around
Portugal and Spain and in through the Straits of Gibraltar. A lot
longer haul at around 1,500 miles, but a defi nite adventure.
Alas, for offshore newbies like ourselves, big open water with
30-foot tidal rise and falls, raging currents and Atlantic swells theTesting the air draft of
Nomade to the maximum
in the ArdennesJANUARY 2016 51CANALS TO THE MED