Boat Plans Butler | Rowing the Nile well some of it

Boat Plans Butler

© Nile Rowing Expedition,
Martin Paasman.

At 6,853km long, the River Nile is the Worlds longest river. Which obviously makes it a tantalising location for expedition rowing. 

However, in the same way that the answer to the question "How do you eat an elephant?" is "One bit at a time", a wise approach to rowing the Nile is to start with the 720km chunk from Luxor to Cairo. 

And thats exactly what my friend Martin, a Dutch long-distance rowing fanatic of the first order, spent 10 unforgettable days doing (do the maths – thats a lot of rowing day after desert-hot day).

Nile Rowing Expedition, Martin Paasman.

The importance of paperwork
Of course, you cant just rock up on the banks of the Nile, drop your boat in the water, and row away from the nearest pyramid into the sunset. The Nile is a major commercial river, and with other security concerns in the region too, the Egyptian government was concerned about the expeditions safety. This meant that it took a full eighteen months to get all of the appropriate permissions to start the trip, and arrange for Egyptian police boats to escort the rowing crews all the way on the water (possibly not the worst task an Egyptian policeman has to undertake in the line of duty). But all this desk-work was well worth it, and led to a safe trip in the end.

Just in case youre geographically challenged (like me)
So, the Nile flows North. Which I think is relatively unusual (but I gave up gegraphy at school when I was 14, so Im hardly an authority). Egypt is the last of 11 countries it flows through before it pours into the Mediterranean.

Luxor (the starting point) is near the bottom of the map below, and in case youre wondering, this isnt a special, minimalist map only showing the route this expedition took: there really isnt anything on either side of the Nile till you get to Cairo.

Enough of this geography, what about the rowing?
The on-water team was made up of 15 experienced rowers from the Netherlands, Germany and America. The Expedition hired two touring coxed quads from the Arab Contractors Sporting Club in Cairo. For some reason that no one ever quite got to the bottom of, Luxor Rowing Club doesnt actually have any rowing boats, although allegedly the organise an annual regatta and, rather like the famous very hygenic cheese shop that was totally devoid of cheese, the lack of boats meant there was a lot of space for rigging the boats.

Rowing on the Nile (taken from a VERY high bridge).
© Nile Rowing Expedition, Martin Passman.

WIth 15 rowers and just ten seats, each day five of the team had the opportunity to do some tourism.

Most participants arrived early in Luxor to visit the beautiful ancient monuments, enjoy Luxor and to get accustomed to the heat. White shirts with long sleeves, sun hats, and sunscreen were essential kit.

An unusual start
The first day of rowing started with a ‘blessing’ ceremony with fresh flower leaves for a safe journey by a representative of the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and made the crews feel welcome. And then they were off, rowing on the Nile, passing the Karnak Temple (Luxor) on bow side and the Theban Necropolis on stroke side.

The Nile in these parts is a slow-moving, winding river, with palm trees and villages on the banks. And although as a whole its very wide, the combination of bends and numerous islands meant that the crews often found themselves on more intimate waterways where they encountered lush, green scenery, filled with birds and fisherman rowing traditional boats. Sometimes when the river had made her way through an area with rocky mountains they rowed with a barren desert on one side but  towering cliffs on the other. What didn’t change was the blistering sun with temperatures up to 40 degrees centigrade. 

© Nile Rowing Expedition, Martin Pasman

Lunch breaks in little villages along the Nile proved that the Egyptian people were very friendly. They provided the rowers with fresh baked ‘sun bread’ , tea and shared the shade under their trees. In the evening they assisted in hauling the boats out of the water.

Meanwhile, on the bank...
Those not rowing on any given day had a fantastic time exploring Egypt’s rich cultural heritage, including the Pharonic temple in Karnak, the Coptic Red Monastry in Sohaq and the famous Islamic mosque in Qena, whither they were escorted by a very polite local police chief (once again, better than traffic duty in central Cairo). They toured in a minibus on dusty roads and through Egyptian villages with friendly people and cattle on the road.

© Nile Rowing Expedition, Martin Paasman.

And, in case you were wondering, despite their best efforts, most participants also ‘enjoyed’ one or two days of not rowing due to food poisoning, sleep deprivation, heatstroke or exhaustion from the daily distances of up to 90 km. Well, it was always billed as an expedition not holiday.

Before we knew it, the crews were rowing into Cairo. We finished accompanied by an armada of rowing boats, official representatives and the press. A dream came true!

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Fancy rowing on the Nile yourself?

Due to the success of this expedition two new trips are being planned. The first will be a recreational rowing tour from Aswan to Luxor over 220km in 5 days, starting in the second half of October 2014, with a sightseeing program before and after the tour, 

This trip will be followed by repeating the breathtaking rowing expedition tour from Luxor to Cairo over 720km in 10 days, starting in late October 2014.

Both tours will combine rowing with culture. We will visit world famous heritage sites like the Pharonic Abu Simpel temples in Southern Egypt near Aswan, Thebes (Luxor) with the Valley of the Kings with the tombs of the most important Pharaohs, the Pyramids near Giza and the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.

For more information about these tours visit http://thenilerowingexpedition.blogspot.nl/  or contact Martin Paasman. 

The Nile Rowing Expedition was an idea of Carola Grün and Martin Paasman, both members of Rowing Club De Laak in The Hague, the Netherlands. It was organized together with  Dabuka Expeditions, Arab Contractors Sporting Club, Luxor Rowing Club and the Egyptian Rowing & Canoe Federation. Under the patronage of the Ministry of Tourism and the Egyptian Tourist Authority.

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Boat Plans Aluminum | The Rallye du Canal du Midi The salad is being served

Boat Plans Aluminum

This event in southern France is so much more than a rowing expedition, or so we eventually figured out. It was equally a water-based opportunity to explore the thing that the southern French care most about – food, and wine.

But after various faux pas and misunderstandings, the organisers eventually realised that we werent deliberately trying to be rude; rather, it was just that we were British and didnt understand. 

It was very, very HOT.

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Event: Rallye du Canal du Midi
Where: Toulouse to Béziers, France
Distance: 200km or so, plus a sprint regatta on the last day
Time: 5+1 days in stages, some untimed
Boat type: Touring coxed quads (known as "yolettes")
Number of crews in the event: 37
Event Organiser: Association de Toulouse Pierre-Paul Riquet

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I first heard about the Rallye from some Dutch (I think) fellow participants in the Vogalonga to whom I got chatting on a vaparetto after the event. 15 months later, I was on the start line in Toulouse, with my husband and three friends. 

Wed arranged to meet a British rowing acquaintance, who then ran his own vineyard very near to the point wed be stopping for lunch on the Wednesday, and who occasionally sculled on the canal. On discovering our plans, he cautioned us that "You do realise its like doing the Boston Marathon every day for five days, dont you?", but actually the rowing turned out to be the easy bit.

The coxs seat may have come from
a classroom, but it was
practical and comfortable.

We meet our boat for the week
So, back to the car park by the opaque green river, in one of the less salubrious parts of Toulouse, and we found the boat that wed arranged to hire from the event organisers, the Association de Toulouse Pierre-Paul Riquet (PPR designed and built the Canal du Midi, an effort which more or less ruined and killed him). The ATPPR are a very dedicated bunch of individuals, who have worked hard to run this large event for years, but its quite a cash-strapped organisation, and on first sight, we were somewhat disappointed by the quality of the boat and blades. Later, it emerged that the boat was actually pretty suitable for what we were going to put her through, though we still thought that the blades had all the materials-science qualities of wilted celery. And heavy wilted celery at that.

After some rustic rig adjustments (just put some rusty washers under it, thatll jack the height up), we set off with 27 other yolettes, 4 brave singles and 5 almost as brave doubles. Their bravery was less to do with the many miles theyd have to row on their own, and more with the sheer difficulty of clambering out of less stable boats on your own at locks that were quite without landing stages or other places to get out of a small  boat with riggers.

At this point, I should record that there were two Belgian crews, one in an Empacher yolette, for goodness sake. The feeling that they were "over-dressed" in this high quality craft never really went away all week.

Chariots of hire

Portaging the boat on the chariot.

All of the yolettes in the event also had to be equipped with a "chariot" (say this in a French accent, please), which turned out to be an extremely robust piece of carpentry with small bicycle or possibly large pram heels attached. We were told we would need to put our boat on this to "portage" it round locks, which we were not allowed to go through (because it would have taken FAR too long and also used far too much water in a canal  that has to be fed from the mid-point, unlike British locked rivers, of course).

We had no real idea about how we would use the chariot at locks, but no doubt all would become clear once we got to the first one.

In fact, it didnt. And it took us a day and a half to get to grips with our chariot lock technique, by which time we had lost so much time compared with the handful of other fast crews, that we never clawed our way further up the rankings than third place, but more on this later. 

Suffice it to say that at various locks we managed to knock our rudder off, let the rudder strings trail out the back of the boat, drop the chariot in the water, and just be generally inept. Once wed honed the technique, though, my role, as the smallest member of the crew, was t be the "trolley dolly", and insert it under the boat when we pulled it out, and whip it out from under the boat at the last minute when relaunching. 

The chariot stowed correctly in the bows.
Note the bend on those wilted-celery blades!

It even took us a couple of gos to work out the best way to place the chariot in the boat, which was sideways (if youre ever doing the event, reply to this post and Ill explain more!). On the final day, we got chatting to the French crew from Lille, who were lovely, and ribbed us gently about how a bunch of obviously fit youngsters like us had let a bunch of 50 somethings like them beat us. We explained about our initial hopeless lock technique, and they smiled knowingly – having clearly been amused by our antics, but also having left us to figure it out for ourselves. We cant really blame them.

Lunchtime
Wed rather assumed that lunch would involve sandwiches and maybe a piece of fruit. If we were lucky, it might be French bread. But thats because a picnic is what we, as Brits, would expect to eat at lunchtime, on holiday, and especially on a riverbank in August. How wrong we were. Dont forget that many French people still go home for lunch, and have a proper meal. And the fact that we were in the middle of nowhere next to a field of sunflowers was no reason not to eat properly.

Waiting for lunch on Day 1.

There were 3 courses every lunchtime, and two bottles of red wine PER CREW. I kid you not. When the organisers came round to clear the tables at the end of the meal, they eyed up our bottles of wine - wed drunk about a quarter of one of them between the five of us - and asked, incredulously whether we were finished. As the week went on, I imagine that there were as many amused comments amongst the organisers about the strange rosbifs who dont drink good red wine to aid their digestions at lunch, as there were amongst us about the strange organisers who seem to think that serving red wine at lunch is a good idea when we have over 2 hours to row in searing heat.

The paella served on the first day was merely breaking us in gently: we eventually figured out that each lunch was an opportunity to sample the signature dish of the nearest town, and so it was that on absolutely the hottest day of the whole trip, we were served cassoulet for lunch - which would be a great thing to have after a long, frosty walk in the Cairngorms in, say, January, but was almost inedible to us. 

The fleet took up quite a lot of space, when stopped.

On that particular day, we were in a small town, and the lunch tables had been set up in the shade of a buttermarket-type place. Whilst we were making the most of the coolness of the thick stone building, a couple of the French participants sat on the terrace outside to sunbathe until the first course was set out. We were definitely culturally out of our depth!

Our faux pas with the salad
By Day 3, wed sussed our lock technique, and managed to achieve our first stage win, bring us up from 4th place to 3rd. When the results for the morning were put up on an easel noticeboard in the lunch area, all five of us were crowding round, comparing with other crews, as any "normal" British rower would, when one of the organisers rushed over and said, "Stop that, the salad is being served." The pre-eminence of gastronomy strikes again – there is nothing, simply nothing more important to the French than eating. And that includes winning.

Locks and shady construction features

An olive-shaped lock. With olive-coloured water.

First up, locks on the Canal du Midi are olive-shaped not rectangular. Im not an engineer, but I imagine this gives them a particular strength, as well as character. Though theyd be a pain to moor up in were one allowed to enter one, which we werent, of course.

Second, there are plane trees planed along one bank of almost the entire length of the canal. Whichever tree nursery got that contract must have been laughing all  the way to the bank, although I bet Pierre-Paul Riquet demanded a massive bulk discount. 

Anyway, these are still the original plane trees that were planted when the canal was built in the 1700s. So theyre getting on a bit, but nowadays, their roots more or less hold the bank together, so it will be nigh on impossible to replace them.

The canal twists and turns a surprising amount, which meant that, with trees mostly only on one side of the canal, we were sometimes in full sun, and sometimes in the shade of trees. It really was that hot, especially during the afternoon sections, that whoever was coxing would frequently call out things like "600m till a corner and some shade", which was the best news the sweltering rowers could hear.

Whoever was coxing also provided advance judgement on looming bridges - first giving notice of whether they were wide or narrow (which might necessitate pulling blades in) and second on the structures architectural qualities: "Charming old stone bridge", or "Ugly metal girder bridge", being the most common.

The entrance to the Tunnel du Malpas.

First prize in the "Exciting Coxing" competition was the 170m+ long Tunnel du Malpas which required pretty accurate steering, because there was no more than 2 feet clearance on both sides. I bagged coxing this, an arrangement that suited all members of the crew, although to my shame did brush the wall once, sorry.

The runner up was an incident on Day 4 of the trip, by which time motor boats were becoming more frequent. I realised that we were rapidly catching up with a wide and slow-moving boat that was quite oblivious of us approaching behind, and so was merrily put-put-putting away down the middle of the canal, leaving insufficient space on either side for me to get past. So I called for 10 firm from the crew, after which (with advance warning) they immediately easied and pulled their blades across, so we could sneak up the side of the cruiser, carried past by our momentum. We just made it.

Fortified, and not just by the red wine

Carcassonne.

Although sleeping at night was quite difficult because the temperature hardly dropped at all, we did enjoy our accommodation for the first three nights which was in the Youth Hostel in the fortified town of Carcassonne. In a very European manner, all dormitories were mixed: but the Belgian gent who was shoved in with the five of us (two women and three men), was unfazed, so we pretended not to be either.

The final days sprint regatta: and we still didnt understand
After arriving in our final destination, Béziers, on the Friday afternoon, we parked the boats in Béziers Rowing Cub car park for the night, and returned the next day for a little sprint regatta. It involved racing three abreast, and there must have been some kind of repechage system, as we kept getting told to turn around and join some other line up. We had very little idea what was going on. Although after a few baffling verdicts, we eventually realised they were judging by the stern, not the bows, as happens in every other regatta any of us have ever been to. We put it down as another cultural experience.

In summary
The Rallye du Canal du Midi is a unique event, just dont treat it as purely a rowing challenge. You will also struggle with the heat; with eating French food; with eating rich, cooked meals at lunchtime; with excesses of red wine; with "pipi sauvage" and worse, the facilities when there were any; and with having only a limited clue about whats going on because even if you speak reasonable French, the accents are strong here.

On the other hand, it was a great opportunity to get to know other rowers from all over Europe (and even Canada) over a prolonged row, and the organisers were lovely - they even provided a team of nurse-type ladies who offered a "we will tape up your hands, backs of legs and other injured parts" clinic "Matin, midi, soir" as they put it. Now thats not something you get ANYWHERE else.

Hats are essential.

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