Lake Como by Boat: How to Move Around on the Water

Lake Como is not a lake with a shore around it; it is a flooded valley with three arms, and the arms are what govern everything. The Como branch runs south-west from the centre, the Lecco branch runs south-east, and the two meet the long northern reach at the promontory on which Bellagio sits. From the tip of that promontory you can look down both southern branches at once, which is the single clearest lesson in the lake's geometry and takes ten minutes on foot from the ferry quay.

The consequence for anyone trying to get about is that the road network is a poor model of the lake. Two villages facing each other across a kilometre of water can be the better part of a morning apart by car, because the road has to go all the way down one branch, around the bottom and back up the other. Where the two shores are directly linked at all it is by the car ferries across the middle, and everywhere else the road follows the contour, not the coast.

The shore roads themselves are old and narrow. The route down the eastern side of the Como branch through Torno, Nesso and Lezzeno is walled on both sides in places, single-file where two buses meet, and beautiful in a way that is entirely wasted on anyone in a hurry. There is also no road that follows the water's edge continuously: it climbs away from the lake, tunnels behind villages, and rejoins the water where the topography permits.

Which is why a number of houses, and a few hamlets, have no vehicular approach at all. Their front door faces the water, the back door gives onto a footpath and a flight of steps, and for the people who live in them the boat is not a pleasure craft but the way home. That arrangement is much older than tourism: the villas were built to be arrived at by water, which is why the good ones present their finished faade to the lake and turn a plain wall to the hill.

The lake breathes on a daily cycle, and once you know it you will plan every outing around it. Overnight and into the early morning the tivano falls from the north, coming down off the mountains and out of the Valtellina; it is usually light, it is cold on the skin, and it dies away as the sun gets onto the slopes. Then, through the late morning, the breva comes up from the south as the land warms, builds through the afternoon, and eases in the evening.

This is why the water is glass at seven in the morning and choppy at four. In high summer the breva can put a short, steep chop down the open middle of the lake and along the exposed western shore, and while it is nothing dangerous to a competent boat, it is enough to make a small open runabout wet, uncomfortable and slow, and enough to make lunch at a table on a jetty a windier proposition than the photographs suggest.

The evening return is the other half of the pattern. As the breva drops the surface goes flat again and the light comes down the lake from the west; the hour before dark is, by a distance, the pleasantest time to be out, and it is when almost nobody is. Anyone who takes a boat out only in the middle of the day has met the lake at its least appealing and does not know it.

Sailors on the lake have used this rhythm for centuries and the local names are still the ones people use. It is not perfectly reliable, since weather systems override it and a hot, unstable afternoon can end in a thunderstorm coming over the ridge with very little notice, but as a default assumption for planning a day it is sound.

The lake has a full public service, run by Navigazione Lago di Como, and it is far better than visitors expect. There are three things in the fleet, and they behave differently. Displacement passenger boats work the shore stop by stop and are slow, cheap and pleasant. Fast hydrofoil services run the length of the lake with fewer calls. And the car ferries cross the centre of the lake, linking Bellagio, Varenna, Menaggio and Cadenabbia. They are the only way to take a vehicle from one shore to the other without driving around a whole branch.

For an owner or a long-stay guest, the public boats solve a specific problem: getting somewhere in the evening without having to bring a boat home afterwards. They also make the two shores genuinely interchangeable in the central basin, which is why the villages around that crossing feel connected to each other in a way that villages the same distance apart further south do not.

The limitations are real and worth knowing before you build a day around them. The service is heavily seasonal, thinning substantially outside the summer and again on Sundays and holidays; not every boat calls at every landing stage; the fast services and the ordinary services run to quite different patterns; and the last boat back is often earlier than you want it to be if you are eating dinner. Every one of those points is a timetable question rather than a general truth, and the timetable is published and changes.

The other thing to understand is that the ferries have right of way in practice as well as in the rules, and a private boat is expected to stay well clear of them and of the landing stages when they are working. Around the central crossing the ferries are frequent, large and on a schedule; it is not the place to demonstrate anything.

Both exist on this lake in quantity and they are genuinely different products. Skippered hire puts a professional at the wheel who knows the water, the traffic and the landing stages, and who will take the boat alongside a jetty in a crosswind without anybody having to think about it. Self-drive hands you the boat and the responsibility, within limits set by the boat's power and by what licence, if any, the hirer holds.

The case for a skipper is not competence, it is attention. A skipper knows which jetties will have you and which will not, where the shallows and the submerged walls are, when to leave to be back before the weather turns, and how to lie alongside a restaurant's landing stage for two hours without blocking the boat behind. He also lets everybody aboard actually look at the lake, which is the reason you came. For a first day here, for a group, for anything involving lunch ashore, or for anything at dusk, take the skipper.

Self-drive suits an owner's week rather than a visitor's day: short runs, a swim off the point, going for coffee across the water, taking the children out at seven in the morning. Self-drive boats available without a licence are deliberately modest in power, which is the correct trade. A small, slow open boat on a calm morning is one of the pleasantest things on the lake, and the same boat in a mid-afternoon breva is not.

The commercial distinction to check is what you are actually chartering. A boat with a professional skipper aboard is a different arrangement, with different insurance and different obligations, from a bare boat you take out yourself, and operators here are not always precise in how they describe it. Ask what the insurance covers, what the deposit is against, what happens if the weather cancels the day, and whether fuel is included or settled afterwards.

The rhythm that works here is simple and almost nobody follows it: go early, come in for the middle of the day, and go out again in the evening. Leaving at half past eight rather than eleven changes the day completely: flat water, empty landing stages, the villages before the day boats arrive, and the light still coming across the lake rather than straight down onto it.

Distances are shorter than they look on a map and longer than they feel in a boat. The central basin, where the three branches meet, is compact enough that four or five villages on both shores are within a comfortable morning; the northern reach, up towards the head of the lake, is a different scale of outing and needs a proper boat and a settled forecast. Going all the way to the top and back in a day is possible and is mostly a lot of driving.

Build the day around one fixed point rather than a list. A single lunch, booked, with a known landing arrangement, and everything else improvised around it will beat an itinerary of five villages every time, not least because the pleasure of the lake is in the crossing rather than in the arriving. If you want to swim, do it early, off the boat, in the middle where the water is clean and deep, and away from the ferry lanes.

One further piece of local practice: leave before you have to. The afternoon breva and the risk of a thunderstorm coming over the ridge both build in the same hours, and the difference between a fine crossing home and a bad one is usually the last coffee nobody needed. Skippers here watch the north end of the lake and the tops of the ridges rather than a phone.

The hard constraint on any day in a private boat is not fuel or range, it is where you can put people ashore. The lake's edge is steep and largely walled, the water goes deep very quickly, and a great deal of the shoreline has simply nowhere to tie up. That includes some of the most attractive frontage on the lake, and it includes a number of waterside restaurants which, despite sitting directly on the water, have no jetty and cannot take a boat at all.

There are broadly four ways ashore. A public landing stage in a village, which private boats may generally use only in specified places and never where the service boats work. A restaurant or hotel's own jetty, which is private, is often small, and usually has to be arranged in advance and confirmed on the day. A village basin or a mooring buoy, where you tie up and walk. Or the tender, which is what a larger boat does everywhere else and what many owners here end up doing too.

Where a place does have a jetty, the practical questions are always the same and are worth asking in this order: can it take a boat of your length; is it available for the time you want; is somebody there to take a line; and is it protected from the afternoon southerly. A landing stage that is fine at ten can be an awkward lee shore by two, and the skipper who takes you in has usually made that judgement before you asked.

The dining side of this has its own logic: which kinds of places have jetties, why so many do not, and how to ask. It belongs with the eating rather than with the boat, and it is set out in our guide to eating on the lake.

The lake is deep, cold and surrounded by mountains, and it changes faster than open coastal water. The failure mode is not a storm at sea; it is a hot, still afternoon that turns into a squall coming down a side valley with very little warning, bringing hail, a hard shift in wind direction and visibility down to very little. Everybody who spends time here has been caught once, and it is usually enough.

The northern reach is the most exposed part of the lake and gets both the strongest thermal wind and the longest fetch. The central basin is more sheltered but has the most traffic. The lower Como branch is the calmest of the three and, being narrow and walled by mountains, the one where the wind is most likely to funnel and surprise you.

Autumn and early spring are, in some ways, the finest time to be out: the light is long, the water is empty, the villages are working rather than performing. They are also the seasons with the least daylight to play with and the shortest weather windows, and the public services are on a reduced pattern, so the margin for getting it wrong is thinner.

The other, less dramatic hazard is water level. The lake is regulated, and the level moves seasonally and after heavy rain in the catchment; that changes clearances under low boathouse openings and old bridges, and it affects which landing stages are usable. Anybody keeping a boat under a house here learns their own opening's tolerance quickly.

For anyone staying in a house with its own landing stage, the water is not recreation, it is the front drive. Guests can be met at a village quay and brought straight across, on a route that would mean a long drive around the head of a branch; dinner on the other shore stops being an expedition; and the ferry crossing in the central basin turns two shores into one neighbourhood.

Private water transfers work well on this lake and are one of the most useful things to arrange properly in advance. The two junctions that matter are the arrival point at the southern end of the lake, and the eastern-shore railhead where the Milan line reaches the water. From either, a boat can put people on a private jetty rather than sending them around a branch by road with luggage. How the road, rail and air approaches connect to those points is a separate question and is covered in our guide to getting from Milan to the lake.

The two practical constraints are darkness and weather. Landing at an unlit private jetty in the dark is a different job from doing it at six in the evening, and skippers price and plan accordingly; and a transfer that can be cancelled by weather needs a road alternative held behind it. Neither is a reason not to do it, but both are reasons to agree what happens beforehand.

The one thing we would say to anybody spending a summer here: do the crossing at dusk at least once with nothing else planned. Go out into the middle of the basin as the last day boats are going in, cut the engine, and let the lake do what it does for twenty minutes. It costs nothing and it is why people buy houses here.