Life in Port St Louis

We left Port St Louis on Wednesday 18th September, having spent eleven days there going quietly stir crazy.  Why so long?  Well it rained a lot and frankly after the journey down the canals and rivers we were actually quite tired.  Two or three days disappeared lying in bed listening to the rain and making the odd dash to the local Intermarche supermarket for supplies.  Our French is improving, although slowly and through listening to the radio we heard that there had been major flooding further up the Rhone.  From the local paper we learned that there had been a breach of the Rhone’s banks just down river from Avignon and that more than twenty people had died.  Also, that a group of Australian yachtsmen had been rescued from the mooring at Arles only two days after we had stayed there.  A little later we got the other side of this story.  At the mooring in Arles we had met Russell an Australian who had befriended Thomas, Nicole and Joshi some time before we had met them.  We instantly got on with him and having just been to the bullfight in Arles reinforced him in his conviction to go himself.  Russell went to the fight then stayed another day and then the rains came.  As the level of the Rhone rose a community spirit developed on the moorings and much booze was drunk as the water inched higher and higher and the yotties and motorboat owners circulated from boat to boat discussing the situation.  Eventually the moorings were cut off and the lifeboatmen arrived to “rescue” everyone.  The boaters were transferred to a local community hall where they were fed sandwiches and given beds, although much to Russell’s chagrin (he hadn’t been too keen on being “rescued” in the first place) no booze was provided or allowed.  A couple of days later everyone returned to their boats, which were undamaged.

After our initial torpor at Port St Louis we slowly got stuck in to turning “La Fulica” back into a sail boat and thinking about the challenges of sailing in the Mediterranean.  The biggest issue was how to get weather information and having got it how to understand and interpret it.  We acquired a short wave radio, supposedly essential for picking up forecasts from a variety of sources in the Med, including English language, but so far we have succeeded only in getting very crackly and indistinct transmissions from the World Service.  Also an incredibly good value French Mediterranean Almanac with excellent information on weather services, pilotage around the coast and access to marinas and charges.  Now we monitor the VHF for the French coastguard weather reports, look at the forecasts posted every day in marinas and check the Internet whenever we can find an Internet cafe.  From this a picture emerges, usually depressing.

In between getting the boat ready we explored Port St Louis (that took a short afternoon) and met some old and new faces.  Principal among the new faces were Alan and Niamh (pronounced “Neave”), brother and sister from Eire and their sailboat “Storm Along” – a great name for an Irish boat or perhaps an Irish racehorse.  Alan, who is thirty, earned some money as a software writer and is now keen to spend it bumming around the Med on a yacht for a while.  Niamh is his younger sister, keeping an eye on mad older brother for several weeks before returning to Eire in a week or so.  After meeting many yotties who are careful planners and out to save every penny to extend their cruising time, Alan was a breath of fresh air, off the wall, impetuous and romantic, albeit self-consciously so.  Alan and Naimh had broken their journey to get a train to Monaco to attend the wedding of a friend of Alan’s in Monaco.  There he had blown so much money in a weekend that he was probably going to have to shorten his Med trip by six months or, God forbid, get a job for a few months.  Unsurprisingly, we spent a heavy night on the town with the two of them, including a visit to Port St Louis’ “comedy club” where I lost heavily at pool to Alan and Niamh spilled the beans to Sue about how she had fallen for the very rich and very sexy best man at the Monaco wedding.

Among the old faces Chris and John and their yacht “Sapphire” were the most notable.  We first met them on the Rhone at Viviers and then also at Avignon.  In their early fifties they, like us, appear to have no fixed plans or objectives, other than a vague intention to head somewhere in the direction of Rome for this Winter, where one of their daughters lives.

Port St Louis is a small town surrounded by refineries and heavy industry.  I had expected an industrial wasteland and a haze of pollution.  Actually, one cannot see the industry from the town and the impression one gets is of a pleasant little working class town with a mix of social and private housing developed in a period of municipal socialism, perhaps in the 1960s and 1970s.  One of the groups of flat blocks is called the “Salvador Allende” Estate, so I think we can assume a socialist influence at some point, not to mention the Rue Jean Jaures.  There is a Social and Cultural Centre which contains an internet cafe open in the afternoons – twenty desktop PCs and one chap at a desk with just me and one German yottie actually using the place.

During our stay we found one decent restaurant and when we were not working on the boat our main entertainment was watching the comings and goings of local and visiting boats and the odd commercial vessel taking the ship lock down onto the Rhone.  One especially ghastly English couple arrived while we there – it is so good to be able to take a real dislike to people sometimes.  They managed to smack their yacht into the neighbouring boat on the way to a berth and complained loudly about the French to us, assuming I guess that no French people actually speak English.  They were the sort who live in a world of their own preconceptions, for whom every new experience simply reinforces their prejudices and on whom travel is frankly wasted.  I wish such people would stay in their link-detached houses in Stevenage and give their spare cash to people that could really enjoy it.

By contrast a Swiss motorboat limped into the marina one afternoon with engine trouble and occupied by a delightful middle aged couple, their very soppy Alsatian and six cats who they had picked up in various marinas around the Med over the last five or six years.  The chap was a pipe-smoking multi-linguist with a delightful sense of humour and the ability to gently take the piss out of the locals.  On meeting him for the first time I offered a jaunty “Bonjour” to which he replied “You are English?  Good day.  I am sorry but my English is not particulary good, but then one gets so few opportunities to practice it” ... “err ... oui”, I humbly replied.