It can get stormy in autumn. That’s why we were looking for a weather window with moderate winds. We found one, but the wind was sometimes very moderate 😉 . As a result, we clocked up a lot of engine hours. But the night watches were ok.
On the second night, I took over from Mathias and he told me what course I should take. Mathias always likes to have an overview chart on the plotter, zoomed out so far that the AIS symbols of the other ships are still displayed, but no more distracting depth contours are visible. I left it like that at first. Then a strange light appeared in front of me that couldn’t be on land. I zoomed into the lower chart layers and lo and behold, there was a shallow area and a small island on our route that we had to sail around.
The chosen route still worked, but it was nice to be able to see the obstacles on the map.
We finished anchoring in the bay of Port-St.-Louis-du-Rhone right on time at 8 o’clock in the morning. A telephone conference was scheduled for 9.30 am.
The boatyard where we want to haul the boat out of the water is in a canal about 3.5 nm from our anchorage. That’s a challenge for a dinghy with our small electric motor. But there were no waves or wind that day. So we made our way to the boatyard in the afternoon. The journey took just over an hour. We had a look around the site and organised an appointment to get the boat out of the water. The travel lifts here are not wide enough for us. Trimarans are moved on slip trailers. Although a Neel 45 has been slipped here before, they have no experience with our size. We asked them to give us the dimensions of the slip trailers and sent plans of our boat to the technicians.
This slip trailer is probably a bit small. There is another larger one.
The weather turned too windy again, so we had to wait almost a week before we have our appointment.
