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Canal Nav MCP Server

answering

Canal Nav is answering right now. Last checked 7 min ago. It exposes 6 tools.

Plan canal routes on Great Britain's waterways: lock-aware timing, live closures, boat-fit checks.

Uptime history 51 days of history · worst day 95%
51 days agonow
95.6%
Uptime 24h
87 of 91 checks
6
Tools
read from the server
324 ms
Response time
average over 24h
open, no key
Access
streamable-http

Canal Nav does not always answer

Over the last week it answered 98.6% of our checks. We check every 15 minutes, so you hear about the next outage within the hour — not from your users.

Three servers free · no card

Connect this server

Endpoint below is the one we actually reach during checks — not the one copied from a README. Last verified 7 min ago.

run in your terminal
claude mcp add canal-nav --transport http https://mcp.canalnav.com/mcp
~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json
{
  "mcpServers": {
    "canal-nav": {
      "url": "https://mcp.canalnav.com/mcp"
    }
  }
}
~/.codex/config.toml
[mcp_servers.canal-nav]
url = "https://mcp.canalnav.com/mcp"
.cursor/mcp.json
{
  "mcpServers": {
    "canal-nav": {
      "url": "https://mcp.canalnav.com/mcp"
    }
  }
}
.vscode/mcp.json
{
  "mcpServers": {
    "canal-nav": {
      "url": "https://mcp.canalnav.com/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Available tools 6

Read directly from the server with tools/list, grouped by what they act on. If a tool disappears, we record the date.

plan
plan_round_trip
Plan return-to-start cruises from a point on the inland waterways of Great Britain, sized to fit a number of days. Returns several options: circular loops where the canal network offers one (canal "rings"), plus out-and-back and fewest-locks alternatives, each with distance, lock count, day-by-day plan and suggested overnight moorings. Timing is lock-aware and closures from every GB navigation authority are flagged on each option. Give boat dimensions to get fit warnings, and routes touching tidal water carry a tidal safety warning. The start can be a place name or "lat,lon" coordinates.
plan_route
Plan a boat journey between two points on the inland waterways of Great Britain (canals and navigable rivers). The route follows the water itself, not roads. It counts every lock and estimates cruising time from realistic boat speed plus time per lock. Live closures and stoppages from every GB navigation authority (Canal & River Trust, Environment Agency, Scottish Canals, Broads Authority and others) are routed around automatically, and when a dated closure blocks the natural line the result compares waiting for it to reopen against taking the detour. Give boat dimensions to get per-waterway fit warnings (too long, too wide, too deep, too tall for a waterway on the route). Routes that cross tidal water carry a tidal safety warning. Places can be names (resolved on the waterway network) or "lat,lon" coordinates. If a name matches several distinct locations the tool returns the candidates instead of guessing; call again with the chosen one.
closures
get_closures
Live closure, stoppage and restriction notices for the inland waterways of Great Britain, covering every GB navigation authority: Canal & River Trust, Environment Agency, Scottish Canals, Broads Authority, Bridgewater, Middle Level, River Wey, Basingstoke and more, not just CRT. Search near a place (name or "lat,lon", with an optional radius) or by waterway name (e.g. "Oxford Canal"). Returns active and upcoming notices with dates, the responsible authority, whether each one blocks navigation, and links for detail. Data refreshes from the authorities' published notices, so reopen dates reflect the latest updates.
directory
search_directory
Search Canal Nav's directory of waterside businesses on the British inland waterways: marinas, chandleries, boat hire, boatyards, pump-out and services, fuel, moorings, surveyors, brokerage, and canalside food and pubs. Filter by free text, category, or proximity to a place. Listings marked unclaimed can be claimed for free by the business owner at https://canalnav.com/.
place
find_place
Look up a place name on the British inland waterway network and return matching locations with coordinates (marinas, moorings, water points and other waterside facilities). Use it to disambiguate a place before calling plan_route or plan_round_trip, or to get coordinates for a known spot. Results are waterway locations only; it is not a general geocoder.
will
will_my_boat_fit
Check boat dimensions against the published maximum craft dimensions for a named British waterway (length, beam, draught and air draught, from Canal & River Trust published figures covering the full CRT network). Returns a per-dimension verdict quoting the limit. Draught and headroom vary with water level and silting, so treat the answer as advisory. For a whole journey, use plan_route with boat dimensions instead: it checks every waterway along the route.

Endpoints

URLTransportStateLatencyChecked
https://mcp.canalnav.com/mcp streamable-http answering 233 ms 7 min ago

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Canal Nav — questions

Answers built from our own checks of this server.

What can Canal Nav do?
It exposes 6 tools, read directly from the server on our last check. Among them: find_place, get_closures, plan_round_trip, plan_route, search_directory, will_my_boat_fit. The full list with descriptions is on this page — we take it from the server itself via tools/list, not from a README. How MCP servers expose tools in the first place →
Is Canal Nav working right now?
We send a real MCP handshake every 15 minutes. Over the last 24 hours 87 of 91 checks got a reply (95.6%), average response time 324 ms. The bar chart above shows every period we have measured.
How do I connect Canal Nav?
Copy the ready config from this page — we generate it for Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Codex, Cursor and VS Code, each with the file path that client actually reads. It is a remote server, so there is nothing to install — the client connects to the address.
Does Canal Nav need an API key?
No. Canal Nav completed a full MCP handshake with us as an anonymous client and listed its tools without asking for anything. All 6 of them are readable on this page. This is what we observed, not what the docs claim.
How fast is Canal Nav?
It answers our handshake in 324 ms on average, which is faster than 50% of all working MCP servers we measure. The comparison comes from our own checks across the whole registry, every 15 minutes.