Saint-Pierre

Well it’s been an interesting few days. Sadly our night at Roquemaure was cut short, John awoke just before 1am to the boat rocking around a lot, ‘ it’s just a passing barge’ he mumbles, I point out that it’s been getting steadily worse for the last hour and is nothing to do with passing traffic but the rising wind. He has a look around and decides that we had better move, luckily we should be able OK across the river on the ‘passenger boat quay’.
It was a bit scary crossing in the dark and trying to tie to something we hadn’t seen before but we got there, it was still bumpy but better.
In the morning we decided to set of earlyish to Saint-Etienne-des-Sorts passing through one lock on the way, it was wind against current for the whole trip and not pleasant. Who would have thought I would have had to worry about seasickness on a river!
Fortunately and unfortunately the pontoon that supposed to be at Saint Etienne wasn’t there, even if it had been it would have been very untenable. New plan either travel a further 37km to next probable pontoon in Viviers or try anchoring in the mouth of the Old Rhône 2km along. We decided to try anchoring and see how things went. This was a good choice the anchorage was lovely, swans and herons, the downside was the very noisy trains, they sounded like fighter jets but at least it was sheltered. With nothing to do I started another knitting project, we spent the night there the trains stopped and wind died so it was a quiet night.
This morning we headed towards Viviers things were going well, we passed through the Bollène lock rising 23m, a double barge pusher, came out just before we went in and another 120m 2302ton barge was waiting to enter when we exited. The canal was bordered by lots of industry and a nuclear plant. Just as we reached the scenic Donzère gorge there was a huge storm, thunder, lightning, hail, rain and wind. Incredible!Read more