G'day from Marseilles

That old adage that cruising is spent carrying out repairs and maintenance in exotic locations is pretty well right at this point in time. We have spent just under a week in Port Saint Louis at the mouth of the Rhone attacking “the List” and chasing mail from NZ and Perth. The area is called ‘Province’ and within it lies the Camague, known for it’s wild grey horses, rice growing and water birds. We rode 10 km to the beach one day over the flat marsh land that is the vast delta of the Rhone. Along the way, amongst the salt pans and brackish estuaries we counted 44 flamingos. The Mosquitoes here are worse than I have ever seen in an urban setting.

On Thursday morning at 7am we cast off for Marseilles. We had planned to leave at 4am in the morning but were pleasantly surprised to find it wasn’t 55 miles away as previously thought but only 25 miles. We had a fantastic sail, downwind with 20 knots and the full headsail out. A sail maker at Marseilles had said that his friend the rigger may be able to swage our NZ terminals so we went there in hope that we could finally get new rigging for PC.

Its pretty trippy sailing into a Rivearian setting like this. There are at least 3000 yachts in the marina which is situated centrally to this old port town. There are more olive skinned suits talking on mobiles and holding leather briefcases than there are crumbs in a croissant . Everyone groovy rides a scooter. Because the streets are pretty dirty and the air pollution smudges the edges of the blue sky, the city looks far better at night when the architecture is lit up and the bars set out their chairs and tables.

We now have new rigging and will be moving on this morning after a quick weather update.

We stumbled across and unsecured wireless network this morning and as such we are posting this from the comfort of PC’s saloon and Blue has just gone on deck to take a photo of the Marseille marina area to post as well.