Bizarre or brilliant, boating is always good fun with the right company, but what if you could race a boat built like a banana? Pavla Tolonen delves into Belgian bathtub racing.

As peculiar as any local fête, the International Regatta of Bathtubs proves tricky for foreign comprehension but elaborate and exciting for eager inventors.

Boasting previous contraptions such as the crisp bag float and a Viking ship, the race is entirely based on baths, and bans any sort of motor which is not made of the actual thing. Tricking or sabotaging a competitor is another absolute no-no, but fighting to the end is a requirement – so is actually floating.

The tub, these days, is hardly visible, as the designs have become increasingly sophisticated and detailed with motifs ranging from political activism to peddle-bike simplicity or butchers who simply like meat-cleavers. Despite this, it is still very much a family event, and bringing a child to the race is crucial for its future boat-building abilities. Around 20,000 people join in on the event.

Lucky contestants sail down the Meuse River with a wide-eyed audience perched in the 11th century Citadel up the hill from which you can see the whole town, especially the Collegiate Church of Notre-Dame. Others sit by the river front on picnic blankets or chairs from local cafés.

Social aspects aside, Dinant is hailed for fostering far more creative talent than just bath racing. It is the home of David Dinant, the pantheistic philosopher who believed “God is everything”. It is also home to Adolph Sax who invented the saxophone in 1846, however the town lost some of his legacy to Paris as he studied there and was buried in the Cimetière de Montmartre.

As well as creative thinkers, the town has seen many battles and once faced an 800-people massacre by the Duke of Burgundy who ravaged the area for many hundreds of years. Now the locals prefer to emphasise on the race and the “Couques de Dinant”, small honey, clover and ginger biscuits, which are rumoured to be the hardest biscuits in Europe.

Dinant, which is 98 kilometres south of Brussels, has celebrated the regatta for 26 years, proving one of the oldest bathtub races in the world, and is only rivalled by a few other serious nautical contenders like the BayFest at the Marine Corps Bay in Hawaii. The 27th regatta will be held on 15 August 2009.

Image credit: Julien Dolhet

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