Most accounts of crossing France by canal start at the Channel and head south. I came at it the other way. After a season in the Med I wanted to bring the boat home through the middle of France, which meant learning the inland game from the Mediterranean end, in reverse, against the current and entirely upside down compared with everyone else's guidebook. It was the steepest learning curve of my cruising life and also one of the best weeks I have had afloat. Here is how a canals mediterranean first week actually goes when you start at the bottom.
We were a 38-foot sloop, 1.9 metres draught, with a mast we had to lose. The plan was simple on paper: get the rig down, get into the system at Port-Saint-Louis-du-Rhone or Sete, and feel our way north through the first locks before tackling the Rhone proper.
Where the sea ends and the canal begins
There are two doorways into the French canals from the Med. The eastern one is the sea lock at Port-Saint-Louis-du-Rhone, the gateway to the Rhone and the route to Lyon and beyond. The western one is Sete, which feeds the Canal du Rhone a Sete and the Canal du Midi. We chose Port-Saint-Louis because we were heading up the Rhone.
The sea lock there is a serious bit of kit, 160 metres long and 22 metres wide, with a minimum depth over the sill of 5.5 metres. After the open Med it feels enormous and slightly absurd for a small yacht, but you lock through with commercial barges so the scale makes sense. This is your first lock and it is a gentle one, big, slow and well supervised. If you want to know what to expect before the gates close behind you, read how a French lock works first; it demystifies the bollards, the lines and the turbulence.
Stepping the mast
The single biggest job is the rig. Air draft, not water draft, is what stops you on the canals. The fixed bridges on the Canal du Rhone a Sete give a minimum headroom of around 4.1 metres, though that is slowly being raised towards 5 metres on the main line, and elsewhere in the system bridges sit lower still. No sailing yacht is getting under that with its mast up. You step it before you start and carry it on deck on a frame, or you arrange storage and collect it at the far end.
There are crane services at both Port-Saint-Louis and Sete that do this all day in season. Budget for it and book ahead. The full picture of what fits is set out in the guide to air draft on the French canals, which is the piece I wish I had read a month earlier rather than the night before.
The first proper days
With the mast lashed down and the lock behind us, the character of the trip changed completely. No more swell, no more reefing, no more anchor watches. Instead: bridges to judge, locks to work, and a 6 to 8 knot speed limit that forces you to slow down in every sense.
The maximum authorised draught on the improved sections of the Canal du Rhone a Sete is now 2.2 metres, up from the old 1.8, so our 1.9 was comfortable. Even so, I kept to the centre of the channel and watched the depth sounder constantly, because canal edges silt up and the published figures assume the centre line.
If you went in at Sete instead, your first week leads straight towards the Canal du Midi, and the overview of the Canal du Midi by boat is the natural companion read for that branch. From Port-Saint-Louis the early miles take you across the strange flat world of the Camargue before the Rhone gathers itself for the climb north.
Why the Rhone is not a canal
This is the thing nobody quite prepared me for. The Rhone is a great muscular river, not a gentle ditch, and going upstream you are pushing against a current that can run at 5 or 6 knots in places after rain. The locks are huge hydroelectric structures, some lifting you more than 20 metres in a single chamber, and they are run for commercial traffic first and pleasure boats second.
You call the lock keeper on VHF, you wait your turn behind the barges, and you rig your lines for a long vertical lift with floating bollards if you are lucky and fixed ones if you are not. A 12-metre boat with two people can manage it, but it is work, and the first few are genuinely intimidating. The guide to the Rhone from Lyon to the Mediterranean covers the lock-by-lock detail for the whole river; read it before you commit, because once you are in the current there is no easy turning back.
What the first week taught me
Coming at the canals from the salty end, a few lessons landed hard:
- Slow is the whole point. We averaged maybe 30 kilometres a day and that was plenty. Rushing a lock is how lines and fingers get hurt.
- Fenders, fenders, fenders. Canal walls and lock chambers are unforgiving. I hung four a side and a couple of fender boards for the rough stone chambers.
- Carry long warps. The drop in a big Rhone lock means a standard mooring line is nowhere near enough.
- A capable crew member on the helm while you handle lines is worth more than any gadget.
The paperwork before you start
The canals have their own bureaucracy and it is best sorted before you reach the first lock. You need a waterways licence, the vignette, which you buy from the navigation authority and display aboard; the cost depends on your boat's surface area and how long you want it for, and a fortnight pass is far cheaper than an annual one. The detail is set out in the guide to the VNF vignette for the French waterways, and I would buy it online before arriving so you are not queuing at a lock office.
You also need the right competence. A foreign coastal qualification does not automatically cover inland navigation, and on most of the network you are expected to hold something equivalent to the inland endorsement. The piece on the CEVNI and ICC licence for the French waterways explains exactly what France recognises for visitors, which saved me a nervous moment when a lock keeper asked to see my ticket on the second day. Carry your boat papers, insurance and licence somewhere accessible, because spot checks do happen.
Life aboard slows right down
The thing that surprised me most was how completely the rhythm of the days changed. At sea you are always half-watching: the wind, the sails, the next headland. On the canal you watch nothing but the next bridge and the next lock, and between them you can stand at the helm with a coffee and simply look at France going past at walking pace. We tied up most evenings against a quiet bank or in a small port, ate ashore when there was a village and aboard when there was not, and went to bed without setting an anchor alarm for the first time in months.
It is sociable, too, in a way coastal cruising rarely is. You meet the same boats lock after lock, working the chambers together, and the hire-boat crews and the long-distance liveaboards mix on the pontoons in the evening. After a season of solitary anchorages it took some getting used to, and then I came to love it.
How far in a week
Realistically, from Port-Saint-Louis you can be well up the Rhone towards Avignon and Lyon in a week if you push, or you can dawdle through the Camargue and the lower river and barely scratch it. We chose the middle path and finished the week tied up in a small river town, mast on deck, eating far too well and wondering why we had ever found the sea relaxing by comparison.
If you are planning the whole transit rather than just the start, the route to cross France by canal from the Channel to the Med is the pillar to read, and the comparison of the canals versus the Biscay route south will help you decide whether to bring the boat home this way at all. Starting from the Mediterranean end is the unusual direction, but it has one great advantage: you learn the locks while the river is doing the hard work of slowing you down.
