The lovely green Aare, eh

Another project for this summer is a Giorgo memorial trip. I inherited a folding boat from my father. This canoe is over 50 years old and a beautiful piece of craftsmanship.

I wanted to paddle it down the Aare from Bern to the Swiss border. An undertaking that takes several days. But unexpectedly, climate change has reached Switzerland too, and the hot summer has led to a water shortage. The river levels are simply too low for my plan.

Unfortunately, nobody saw it coming, and the issue has caught Swiss politics completely unprepared. There is hope that by the end of summer the topic will no longer be quite as controversial as it apparently was at the beginning of summer: yes, climate change really exists, no, it is not good for agriculture. Shocking, I know.

But then it rains after all, wonderful:

So I decide to go after all. The Aare is also a river that can be fairly well regulated by various weirs. According to the forecasts, there should therefore always be a hand’s breadth of water under the keel, as we sailors say.

However, not with the folding boat, it is simply too impractical and too heavy for one person. Alex and I buy ourselves an inflatable kayak on Ricardo, which is only half as heavy and can be set up in 15 minutes. Definitely a good purchase for our future boat life too.

I take public transport to Bern, where I launch. From Bern, I drift down the Aare for 4 days to Biel. I make a lot less progress than expected. In places there is probably a metre less water depth than there should be, sometimes I have to get out and carry, often there is no current at all and I paddle until my arms are dead tired. Even so, it is beautiful and enormously lonely. I did not know you could still be so alone in the middle of Switzerland.

R.I.P.

*This blog post has been automatically translated by a Large Language Model.