The South of France - Finding Port Miou

The south of France has so many places to stay, anchor and marinas it's like we have gone from no choices to too many. Where do you want to go? We have 10 choices. How far today? Ten miles. These are choices we haven't had since Greece. The west coast of Italy is pretty rugged and has very few anchorages between Rome and La Spezia unless you head to Sardinia, Corsica and Elba. We got into the mode of 50 mile days and staying in marinas so we have a bit of catching up to do of just tooling around and letting the prevailing wind help us decide what to do.

We were sailing along under spinnaker, doing about 5 or 6 knots and the first place we had intended to stay didn't look all that attractive. The second place was open to swell from the south so we kept going. There was a beautiful anchorage but again it was open to swell to the south so we settled on a park called Port Miou. 

It is an incredibly narrow Harbour that is totally sheltered. Port Miou is a former rock quarry -- apparently the  hard white stone here was used to make the Suez Canal. They have put mooring balls down and you tie to a mooring and go stern to the rock walls tying on to hooks they have embedded into the wall. The Port guy comes out in his 20 foot boat and facilitates the process by grabbing the line off the back of your boat and slowly pulling it back to you with his boat -- sucking your stern towards the wall and keeping you from hitting the other boats in the process. So far the nay drawbacks are an endless procession of tripper boats with tourists on them cruising by, and the spring fed fresh water that lowers the temperature by about 5 degrees.

The real attraction of Port Miou is the cliff jumpinq. Ross must have jumped 20 times off the high point of about 12-15 meters or so. Marina lept off the next highest point. Jessie and I kept to the lower point of around 5 or 6 meters. Ross would jump off the lower step at the same time but he would go head first. Cheeky bugger!

Alongside the fun, we needed to do some marketing for food and also find a way to charge our batteries. Our relentless need to recharge our computers eats our house batteries alive. I need to come up with a couple of better systems for that this offseason. Probably a bigger alternator and better system for charging laptops will be in the cards for 2012.