When Ellen and I visited Venice in 1998, we spent several days exploring it on foot and taking nearly every vaporetto (boat bus) route we could find.  But the vaporetti take only the major canals through Venice and the channels out to the other island towns, missing the network of small canals that innervates all of the neighborhoods.  With our kayaking friends,  this was our chance to get a leisurely water level view of Venice experienced only by Venetians and those wealthy enough to hire a gondola or taxi.    I’ll include a few photos of the day here, but for a better look, check out the album on Picasa.

View from the Canale di San Marco at the tourist center of Venice

Now venturing by kayak into Venice is a little intimidating.  Diverse kinds of boats here take the places of cars, buses, delivery vehicles, tankers, construction vehicles, garbage trucks, ambulances, you name it.  So there are boats going everywhere in a hurry.  On our first excursion into the city, we encountered a local kayak guide leading a trip, and were advised to stay single file on the left in the small canals.

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As we threaded our way by kayak past the Arsenale, the ruins of the once mighty naval shipyard that gave Venice its extraordinary power, we encountered our first gondola.  They look really big from a kayak – 34.5 feet long, 880 lbs empty, and carrying up to 6 passengers.  About 40% of the length is overhang, and I now know what it feels like to be under the bow of one.

Gondola

The shape evolved over centuries until the middle of the 20th, when the city fixed the design, so they’re all pretty much identical.  A few hundred years ago there was an estimated 8,000 to 10,000 gondolas in Venice, but now the city licenses a maximum of 425 professional gondoliers to serve tourists.  The whole boat is powered by one oar and one guy*.  The oar is on the right side near the stern, so the boat is constructed asymmetrically with the left side longer than the right.  This causes the boat to naturally turn to the right, offsetting the tendency of the oar to push the bow to the left.  This also means we didn’t want to try passing a gondola on the right where the oar is thrashing.

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Here we are paddling tiny canals lined with buildings as brightly colored as our kayaks on the island town of Burano. We duck out of the way of workboats churning by and pull our kayaks out to explore on foot.

Ellen and other kayakers on Burano

This was certainly not in our plans when we headed to France, but it turned out to be the ideal way to explore the lagoons, islands, and canals of Venice.  With a group of 34 paddlers from our French Palavas Kayak de Mer club, we drove all the way to Venice in 4 vans with trailers of boats to float us all.  We stayed in a campground on the barrier island that separates the northern Laguna Veneta from the Adriatic Sea, some in tents and some in 2-bedroom prefab bungalows.

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