The canal boat trip that taught me how to grieve - The Times

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The French instructor conducting our briefing at Port Cassafières delivered the line with considerable emphasis after my father asked where he could check the engine oil.

To Claire, the woman responsible for our induction, we were another group of holidaymakers preparing to take charge of a canal cruiser. She later realised she was addressing a family of sailors. Between us we had decades of experience at sea, led by a father who had spent a lifetime sailing vessels in waters far less forgiving than the Canal du Midi.

Five months after my mother’s sudden death at the end of last year, my father, Martyn, gathered his five daughters for a week aboard a canal cruiser on the Canal du Midi. For a family raised on ocean crossings and tall ships, the arrangement felt improbable from the start. Yet grief had brought us not to the open sea but to a waterway where progress is measured in locks, shared meals and unhurried conversations.

We came together from Victoria, Vancouver and Ottawa in Canada, London and Oslo. There were no lengthy discussions about the itinerary, only a simple invitation: one father, five daughters, one week together. Julia, our eldest sister, was already living with cancer, but she came nevertheless. What none of us knew was that this would be the last voyage all six of us would ever share. A few weeks later, she would die.

At Port Cassafières, Claire introduced us to our vessel, Magnifique. Throughout the briefing she returned to the same refrain.

It was, she explained, a floating caravan. The anchor was largely decorative. The engine compartment was off limits. Everything had been designed to withstand enthusiastic incompetence.

At the time, we laughed. By the end of the week, I realised Claire had been right, though not in the way she meant. The voyage had little to do with navigation or distance. It was about the people aboard.

The canal was built to connect rivers, provinces and ultimately two great seas. In May, it connected something else: a father and his daughters, scattered across countries and continents, all navigating a different kind of passage.

The route itself was deceptively simple. Beginning at Port Cassafières, just inland from the Mediterranean, we threaded our way west through locks, aqueducts, tunnels and quiet villages, covering surprisingly little distance each day.

Life aboard Magnifique quickly settled into a rhythm of domesticity. The cabins were compact, the storage ingenious and every square metre worked hard, yet there was something surprisingly comfortable about living together in such close quarters.

Mornings began with tea, coffee, cheese and fresh baguettes. Evenings ended with wine and laughter, and each village stop became an opportunity to replenish supplies and discover local delicacies.

The canal formed the backdrop, but the real voyage took place around the galley table, in lock queues, on evening walks through quiet villages and during conversations when we seemed to have all the time in the world.

On that first morning, I opened a fresh logbook. It was a simple softback notebook where I recorded practical details: lock etiquette, favourite wines and the canal’s intricate language of horn signals. A long blast warned of caution ahead; short blasts signalled intentions to other vessels.

Looking back, I was recording far more than a journey. I was preserving moments I did not yet know would matter. Julia claimed the same seat on the starboard side each morning, watching the villages slide past as the canal carried us west.

The locks quickly became the theatre of our voyage. Every approach involved a choreography of ropes, bollards, instructions and anticipation. The lockkeepers presided over it all with quiet authority. Their small offices ranged from immaculate to eccentric; some were decorated with flowers and family photographs, while others contained little more than a chair and a kettle.

Unlike in the rest of France, where one occasionally suspects time has taken the day off, the lockkeepers understood that water waits for no one. Boats arrive when the gates open. Levels must be managed. Traffic must keep moving, though this was still France and lunch retained its sacred status.

More than once I heard approving remarks directed towards us as we approached a lock with lines organised and crew prepared. One lockkeeper simply nodded and declared, “Impeccable.”

It was exactly the sort of compliment my mother, Margaret, would have treasured. She believed that the best voyages, and perhaps the best lives, were built on quiet acts of service.

My parents sailed from Toronto Harbour aboard a small pilot cutter bound for the Bahamas on their honeymoon in the late 1960s and never really looked back. Over the following decades they built, bought and sold boats, taught others to sail and introduced thousands of young people to life at sea.

My sisters and I grew up in that world, where weather forecasts mattered more than television schedules. By the age of ten, I had sailed from Victoria in Canada to Brisbane in Australia, via islands most children encountered only in books.

We were known as the sailing family, and at the centre of it all was my mother, Margaret.

As we secured our lines one afternoon after a series of locks, I found myself looking for her. She would have been the first ashore, the bowline in one hand and a cup of tea in the other.

Julia, too, was never far from my thoughts. Watching her laugh across the table or step ashore in another village, there was no sense that we were saying goodbye. We were simply together, as families have always been together, assuming there would be another voyage.

As Magnifique edged westwards through southern France, it struck me that families are much like rivers. They appear familiar, yet neither the water nor the people are ever quite the same. Loss and time alter their course. We were the same people who had sailed together for decades, yet after grief, distance and the passing years, none of us was quite the same. Like the canal itself, we had continued to move forward, carrying memories, stories and traces of all that had gone before.

This was never really about the boat.

It was about one father, five daughters and a final week together.

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