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1.5 days, dry and mostly sunny, cold n. wind
86 km – 54 ml – 2 locks – 10 hrs
Early March: After lots of research, a route is chosen and a tentative schedule drawn up (see info >>>>). The plan is to arrive in Aigues Mortes on 29 March and depart towards the Rhone on 1 April following a couple of days of boat familiarisation and stowing all our stuff on board.
1 April: In the event, the highish Rhone flow-rates (see info >>>>) combined with forecasts of extreme cold (like snow in Lyon) lead us to hang around for a few days, mindful of Allons-Y‘s lack of cabin heating! So instead of going boating we go eating and drinking, in moderation of course!
Fortuitously, 1 April is Howard and Doreen’s anniversary as well as Doreen’s birthday!
3 April pm: Getting the right balance between waiting for better conditions and putting pressure on our schedule is tricky but we decide to potter along the Rhone a Sete canal to St Gilles this afternoon. This should give us a good launch-pad for going up the Petit Rhone and onto the Rhone itself tomorrow, where we are still expecting it to be pretty cold but with more manageable flow-rates than recently, as long as it doesn’t rain heavily in the mountains.
4 April: After a freezing night on board wearing socks, woollen gloves and double duvets, we have the 21km stretch of the Petit Rhone to ourselves. The river is heavily wooded and not especially interesting, with maybe a knot or two’s flow against us.
We are unlucky to arrive at the main Rhone just behind an enormous barge being pushed upstream ahead of us. We could surge past it on full throttle before reaching our only lock of the day but we’d have to let it overtake us again at that point anyway. The combination of a strong counter-flow, a strong headwind and the incredible wake from the barge make it hard to steer and quite bumpy at times. It isn’t raining but the wipers are needed quite a lot. It’s like a breezy day off the Cornish coast with the following swell overtaking you approaching the harbour – uncomfortable.
We drop back but the swell is still affecting us fully half a mile behind the barge! Then there are the trees, branches and sawn logs to spot and steer around, some of them barely visible in the disturbed water. Howard’s comment when apprised of this is “sounds like fun”. What a guy.
This picture of the distant barge is taken after things are calmer. Before that, sorry, we were too busy having ‘fun’ to take any snaps.
Approaching the lock-gates at Beaucaire ecluse (lock) behind the barge, we are shown the red light and refused entry on safety grounds (see info >>>> for more on the Rhone locks).
This at least means we are free of the barge for the rest of our push up to Avignon, and can continue to wonder at the sheer scale of the river, up to half a mile wide in places.
The sunny and calm approach to the Avignon quay is off the main river and well up to expectations.
However, we feel let down by what we find when we get here (to skip the following whinge, move on to the next page >>>>).
The Avignon quay wall was weed-strewn (shrub-strewn really), the few bollards were too far apart for us (so we tied up to the service-point rails), the electricity was off, the water outlet was non-standard (deliberately as it turned out), the fuel pumps hadn’t been used for several years and the capitainery (aka marina office and showers) was nowhere to be seen. We spent ages walking up and down trying to find the office, without avail – it certainly wasn’t where the large sign was pointing, which was a builders yard. And they weren’t answering their phone. Mon dieu!
So we reconciled ourselves to a second night with no fuel, no water and no electricity (meaning no hot water on board in the morning, a real pain). Not a major disaster as we had planned for such a contingency, but disappointing on our first night on the Rhone. Little did we know, but this sort of thing was to become something of a theme as the voyage progressed.
The next step, in what was left of our evening, was to explore the town and select the best place to eat. But it was Monday and they were all closed. To be fair, it’s the same in Teignmouth. Richard persevered and discovered that the Mercure Hotel restaurant was open and, after a worrying hesitation, they agreed to give us a table. A nice meal, then back to the fridge, sorry, boat.
In the morning, with a tip-off from a guy on a barge near us, we discovered that the office was now a room at the far end of another barge, with an A4 page of service hours taped to its locked door. The young woman inside reacted to the door-rattling by coming outside, explaining that her phone was out of order and hinting that we might have got some services the previous evening if we’d have let them know we were there! And a deposit would have secured the water connector they keep locked up. Rather than the expected apology, she smiled sweetly and shrugged. Our first example of French insouciance but sadly not the last.
Progress so far
86 km – 54 ml – 2 locks – 10 hrs