James River Batteau Festival

The James River Batteau Festival is an annual event where reproduction colonial era batteaus travel the James River from Lynchburg to Richmond.  The festival uses prearranged camp sites & the trip takes 8 days.  This year the river rose as the trip progressed, which made it easier on the crews.  These photos are from the Scottsville camp on Wednesday evening. 

Most batteaus have shade canopies against Virginia’s hot sun.

Some boats use a simple center ridge pole & tarp instead of the half circle canopy.

This gives a fair view of a bateau’s construction. 

Looking downstream, these boats had landed when I got to Scottsville about 4:30 pm.

This batteau’s crew is cooking dinner on an onboard woodstove

Batteau are float boats which are also poled downstream.  They can be poled upstream if the river is deep enough to float the boat in slack water.

These boats have no keel so steering oars at both ends are need to keep the boat on course

This is an older boat that’s both well caulked & the wood has swelled nicely.  This makes for a heavier boat & thus its floating lower in the water.

This is a fairly new boat & thus floats higher in the water.   As the wood absorbs more water, it will ride lower in the water.

Scottsville usually arranges for old timey musicians to play in the batteau camp area.  This group was doing old style fiddle tunes.

My friend the Paddling Potter – I also know him from OVPR & have a couple of pieces of his work.  I’d hope to get one of his jugs latter this year.  His wares are available in Waynesboro.