Wednesday 11 September

We don’t get up very early.  The weather forecast is terrible.  It is suggested that the winds will get up to an 8 with gusts of up to 45Knots!  So we decide we will stay here.  It doesn’t seem that this wind will abate for two or three days.  We certainly are not making good progress.  Let us hope things get better or we will never get to Nice!   We are a bit surprised to see that three other boats have left this morning.  Do they know something we don’t?  Well, we have made our decision, so that is that.

We have a quiet morning.  I finally get to take an inventory of all the food we have.  We shall have to work hard to finish it all before we stop.  Otherwise I will just have to throw it all away or give it away.  I reckon we have at least 6 meals on board using just the store cupboard and not including the fresh food in the fridge!  I also do a bit of cleaning.  It is suddenly lunch time and we have no bread, so we go in to town to see what we can buy for lunch and to make up a meal from my store cupboard.  We now discover that this is a town that closes down completely at lunch time.  We make it to the bakery just as they are closing, but they let us buy a bread.  We guess we will have to go back later to buy enough to make a mushroom risotto.  After lunch Richard finally finds that there is a Michelin recommended restaurant here in town, so we now change all our good plans and decide to go out to dinner.  We make a reservation which is strongly recommended. 

We have decided to go to the beach for the afternoon.  There seems to be a nice beach just along from the Marina and the sun is bright even if it is very windy.  We must say however, it is not as windy as we expected.  The direction has changed slightly, so maybe we are a bit more protected, but the wind speed seems to be no more than 17knots.  Perhaps we were unnecessarily put off, but who knows!  After a nice few hours on the beach soaking up the sun (and me reading more of Ulysses) we go back to the boat.  R goes out for fruit for fasting breakfast tomorrow.  He comes back and tells me he has seen the Flamant Rose (Flamingoes) on the lake behind where the boats are.  On our way to dinner we go that way and there they are.  I have never seem Flamingoes in the wild before.  Every time we have been somewhere where they have flamingoes we have been told they are not there because we are there at the wrong time of year.  So it is exciting.  We are now getting a bit of a feeling for the Camargue.

Dinner is very good.  We eat the local specialties.  Small clams cooked in garlic and parsley, followed by a daube of bull.  It is all delicious.  We try the local apertifs and a local red wine, which is also quite drinkable.  The weather report for tomorrow is still terrible, particularly in the area we need to pass to get to our next port.  So we shall probably stay another day, maybe two.