Boating in Europe Germany

Germany:
Germany boasts a thriving commercial network of rivers and canals carrying over 200 million tons of freight annually, but it also offers extensive opportunities for pleasure boating too, especially for those “long-haul” specialists with ample time to spend.
There are numerous attractive harbours on many of Germany’s rivers and canals, although on the major commercial waterways such as the Rhine and other major rivers flowing into the North Sea and the Baltic they are well spaced out and may be two/three hours apart.

In fact the Rhine is Europe’s busiest waterway, flowing from Lake Constance through Switzerland, Germany and Holland, carrying over 150 million tons of freight annually.

While flowing though historic towns and cities, beautiful villages and at times spectacular mountain scenery,  this means that it’s a fast flowing river, unsuitable for small under-powered craft. To overcome the problem of the speed of the current a number of parallel canal projects have been developed over the years, the best known of these being the Grand Canal d’Alsace at Basle.

The Rhine connects to several other major rivers, such as the Neckar, which is joined at Mannheim, which is a very attractive and popular river for boating, with some 27 locks over a distance of over 200km from Mannheim to Plochingen. The longest Rhine tributary is the Main which is navigable for nearly 400km, with only 34 locks, from Mainz to Bamberg and its junction with the Main-Danube Canal.

Arguably the most attractive cruising waterway in Germany, the Lahn is navigable from its junction with the Rhine at Niederlahnstein to Steeden, some 70km with a dozen locks.
A little way downstream from the junction with the Lahn at Koblence there is the junction with the canalised Moselle, navigable for 200km with again only a dozen locks, and another beautiful river popular for cruising.

The Ruhr is essentially a heavily commercialised waterway, really only of interest to pleasure boaters as a through route, via the Rhein-Herne and Wesel-Datteln Canals, the Datteln-Hamm and Dortmund-Ems Canals and the Mittelland Canal to its junction with the River Weser at Minden.

The Weser is another fairly important commercial waterway, running for `40km to Bremen, but it’s attractive nevertheless. Above Minden it’s fast flowing, with one lock, for over 200km to Hannoversch Munden.
The Elbe is another major commercial waterway, running for some 600km from Hamburg to the Czech border, with only one lock, but it’s quite fast flowing, and very shallow in parts. It’s joined, at Lauenburg, by the Elbe-Lubeck Canal, which runs for 60km to the port of Lubeck.
There are two other waterways worth mentioning here, the Elbe Lateral Canal and the River Saale, but both are still essentially commercial and of little interest to boaters.

The region around Brandenburg and Berlin, between the rivers Elbe and Oder, is Germany’s most popular cruising ground comprising over 900km of navigable waterway, of which the beautiful  Elbe-Muritz-Havel section, with attractive villages, plenty of good moorings and forest scenery  is the star attraction.

An interesting one-week cruise in this region for example might be to start from Lubz and finish at Lychen, taking in Plau, Malchow, the Muritz See, Robel Mirow, Wesenberg and Furstenburg en-route, in total about 150Km, with ten locks.  
The Main-Danube Canal  extends from its junction with the Main at Bamberg for some 170km and 16 locks to join the Danube itself at Kelheim, and, since it opened in 1992, is now  the foremost waterway link with Eastern Europe for both commercial and pleasure boat traffic.

Contacts:
Ministry of Transport, Construction & Housing, PO Box 20 10 00, Robert Schumann Platz 1,
53175 BONN, Germany

Deutscher Motoryachtverband  www.dmyv.de

Nicols Boats www.nicols.com