Port St Louis du Rhone

11/11/12 to 14/11/12


We woke on Sunday morning to see the Brit crew still in their berth despite their assurances of yesterday evening that they were off at first light; turns out that although we had exchanged plenty of info, an important element had been overlooked – 11^th November is a bank holiday and the lock was not in operation.
Fortunately it did give them more time to quiz us about the routes, as they had intended to take the Canal du Centre route so we could at least advise them to plan otherwise!

The weather stayed clear and we put up the mast and rigging, and got up to speed on the weather – thanks to some friends in the biz we had access to their weather station info, which showed we weren’t going anywhere for a wee while.

We said our farewells to the boys on Annabelle, and yet the next morning there they were! Now the lock was working, but the river was closed to non commercial vessels as flooding upriver was causing crazy currents! Thank goodness we had decided to put our foot down and get into the sea before the 11^th or who knows where we’d be moored now!

As it is, Port St Louis seems pretty rough on the face of things, but a huge facelift is being carried out around the port, and without fail every local we met was really nice, and we had a great meal out. When we took a hike to the chandlery to get a hand held GPS, the unit didn’t come with the PC cable as advertised in the catalogue, and the guy said if we didn’t have one lying around he’d bring us one from home!

By this time Annabelle’s crew were considering a coastal hop to Sete and taking the Canal du Midi to the Atlantic and delivering the boat that way, so J made a call to the VNF for them to check if it was open. Same old story there, the first person says it’s open, not a problem, but when we said we had seen somewhere it was closed they looked a bit harder and it had been closed for 2 weeks already and would stay that way til after Christmas! Fortunately for the boys the river slowed significantly overnight and on the morning of the 15^th they were gone by the time we surfaced. Bon voyage to Dean and his crew!