By Boat Across the Channel

By Murgatroyd49 - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org

Back in ye olden times, or at least the 1980s, there was no Channel Tunnel (aka “Chunnel”) to swiftly transport you from the UK to France. Plus, for most travelers, plane flights were either expensive or inconvenient or both.  The cheaper way of travel, especially for backpackers and weekend visitors, was to catch a boat across the water.

In 1986, I did this on a backpacking trip, taking the Hoverspeed ferry from Dover to Boulogne-su-Mer. Hoverspeed was a ferry company which traversed the English Channel via large hovercraft vehicles, or as that stalwart journalistic publication Wikipedia deems them (at least as of today’s editing): “air-cushion vehicles” or ACVs, “an amphibious craft capable of travelling over land, water, mud, ice and other surfaces.”  To a layperson like me, it simply looked like a boat perched on an enormous inflated rubber tube that bounced on the water.  In reality, it’s a nifty transportation method that functions by having a large amount of air beneath the hull of the vessel, so as to create lift, whereby the boat moves or, more aptly put, bounces on the surface of the sea.

It was a choppy and noisy ride, a bit like sitting on rubberized waterskies on high waves with a loud and deafening motor.  And unlike other ships, you got strapped into your seat with a heavy over-the-shoulder seatbelt – no snack bar trips, or duty-free shopping.  But it was only about a 30-minute trip, which was remarkably fast at the time, and cheap in its day.  Not for the faint of heart, or those susceptible to seasickness (I was in the latter category).  Nor was it as cinematically dynamic as Pierce Brosnan made it look in 2002’s Die Another Day, otherwise one of the more tepid and treacly James Bond films.  But it was pretty thrilling to make that journey.  Slightly woozy and ready to hit dry land again once we reached France, I was glad to say I’d had the experience but also ready to leave it behind.

Apparently, it was all a bit much as well for demanding global travelers, not to mention English-French commuters. Hoverspeed shut down hovercraft operations between Dover and Boulogne in 1993, and at various times in the 1990s and early 2000s also ceased crossings between Dover and Calais, Dover and Ostend, Folkestone and Boulogne, Newhaven and Dieppe, and Portsmouth and Cherbourg.  When the Chunnel opened in 1994, that in particular hastened the decline of hovercraft travel across the English Channel.  Today, another company still operates one of the world’s last remaining hovercraft water transports, between Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight.  I’ve sailed on that craft as well, but that’s a story for another blog post.

As of 2018, the Eurostar trains carry roughly eleven million international travelers each year.  The Eurostar is pretty smooth for traveling, generally departs and arrives on time, and overall has been deemed a huge success.  The Chunnel itself has been called one of the wonders of the modern world, and an amazing feat of engineering.  But it will never surpass for me my first trip to France, carried along on the waters on a giant pool float with a motor.

For more information on the history of hovercraft across the Channel, check out the BBC’s excellent article: “What happened to passenger hovercraft?” https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-34658386