Le Mistral

The Mistral at Frioul was my first real experience of a wind with its own name.  Sailing in the Med has given Sue and I an increasingly personal interest in the weather and how it works and we’ve started to read up on it.  Our “Mediterranean Cruising Handbook” lists thirty-five different named winds in the Med from the “Arifi” (the Sirocco from Morocco) to the “Vardaarac”, which must have been christened by a Scrabble enthusiast from its native Greece where it whistles down mountain slopes and out of the Gulf of Thessalonica.  The Mistral is one of the most feared of this lot and is apparently a “mountain gap wind” produced by cold air getting bottled up in Central France behind the Massif Central and the Alps and then suddenly blasting its way down the Rhone Valley, which is the gap between the two.  The Mistral lasts for as long as there is a reservoir of cold air, three, six, nine days or more – rather like squeezing a spot.

I can see how these winds can drive people mad.  On day one and to a lesser extent day two they’re quite interesting – “so this is what a Mistral is like, well it does have its good points, its ever so sunny and you can see for miles, fancy a walk?”  By day three its boring and irritating, having to walk backwards holding one’s hat is no longer fun and the constant whine of the wind in one’s ears is like living with a relative who is always complaining and can’t see any good in anything.  By day four it’s starting to get personal, this bloody wind has deliberately got it in for you and is actually blowing harder in your corner of the marina than anywhere else.  By day five you’ve forgotten what it’s like when the wind doesn’t blow and you don’t want to get out of bed.  Then it pulls its next trick by actually easing off for an hour or two, allowing you to emerge from your pit of bedclothes and despair and to start making plans again – maybe, after all, it is possible to sail in the Mediterranean, perhaps the Cote d’Azure really is within reach.  Then it starts again with renewed ferocity, so that by day six you want to jump up and down and scream and shake your fist at it Lear-like.  “Just bloody stop it will you!”  By day seven ... well fortunately on day seven, Friday 27^th September, it did actually stop, just as Sue and the weather forecasters had insisted that it would, eventually.

After days of inactivity it took us all morning to get the boat ready to sail and to pay our dues.  My suspicions of the Marina’s corruption were confirmed when I went to the office to pay for our last day and was greeted by a rheumy-eyed official breathing stale booze across the desk and dragging on a “Gauloise” directly under the “defense de fumer” sign.  After shuffling through the heap of record cards on his desk with quivering hands for the third time, he declared that he would just have to take on trust that we only owed one days charges and then promptly rounded down the fee to the nearest euro – the marina, of course, only accepts cash.  I’m almost sure he winked at me in return for my cynical and slightly exasperated smile as I handed over the loot.

In the afternoon we motor-sailed in sunny conditions around rocky headlands and into La Ciotat, where after motoring around the busy harbour for a while we found a berth on the harbour wall.  After we had settled into our berth Chris and John from Sapphire came over in their tender from their anchorage outside the harbour and joined us for what was, in effect, a farewell drink, at least for the time being.  They had left Frioul that day too and were keen to press on to Italy and were leaving early the next morning.  I think we will meet again at some point down the road.