We rose early but had a slow breakfast - perhaps putting off the inevitable of entering the Rhone? But we were away at 0945h, and were approaching the entrance to the Rhone a little after 1100h.

Our intention today was to get to the port of Aramon, just south of Avignon.

A bunch of cormorants were sitting on the sign at the confluence of the Rhone and Petit Rhone to say goodbye to us.

The Rhone was wide and smooth and it was like cruising on a big lake. Despite what we had been told, there were no turbulent flows - possibly because we were well into autumn and the downstream flows had dropped away. I calculated that we were doing about 8kph at 1500km, so compared to the canal the downstream flow must have been around 2kph.

We passed five wind turbines south of Tarascon, and they really stood out against the azure sky to the south.

As we approached the Beaucaire-Tarascon Bridge, we saw a large barge near the left pylon.

We couldn’t work out where it was going, until we got closer and saw that it was a timber barge backing down the Rhone to enter an industrial port area about 1km downstream. There was plenty of room to turn, but obviously it must have been easier to go backwards for a while and then drive forwards into the port area.

As we passed through Tarascon, we saw Chateau Roy Rene on the right. Not the prettiest of Chateau, but impressive nonetheless. I couldn’t help think about the old-time Australian comedian by the name of Roy Rene (a.k.a. Mo McCackie), and whether his stage name had anything to do with this Chateau. It turns out it did have a French connection, but not to this Chateau.

A few kilometres further on, we encountered our first big lock at Vallabrègues Ecluse. This one was the same area as the one at St Gilles (200m x 12m) but was much deeper at 11.8m. When we radioed ahead, we were told that the lock would be prepared for us and would be ready to enter in 15 minutes. Since we had called ahead about 2km from the lock, we could continue cruising at 8kph and get there at the right time. Sure enough, as we approached, the gates opened and the lights went green.

The views forwards and backwards were impressive, and a little daunting. The control tower is now no longer used, as all 14 locks on the Rhone are controlled from a central HQ at Chateauneuf Ecluse further up the river, using a system of CCTVs at each lock.

Despite their size, the operation of these locks was simplicity itself from our point of view. In this lock, we put a rope around the floating bollards at front and back. But we learned that this was not really required, so in future locks we simply tied on at the back to a floating bollard, and controlled the front of the barge with occasional bowthruster actions. It really was a one-person operation. The filling of the lock was also very smooth and gentle, as the water entered from below, rather than coming from the front gate.

As we got to the top, Rita (wearing her mandatory life-jacket) was relaxing at the front and the “control tower” was now looking much closer out the back.

After reaching the top, we waited for the front gates to open and the lights to go green, and then drove out the front of the lock. Four kms later, we were passing the town of Vallabrègues, where Bruce Munro had moored his barge Matilda for the winter. It looked secure for the moment but, given that it was on the river-side of all the moorings, we wondered how it would deal with the wake from the passing big barges for the next 6 months.

Around the corner at PK257, we passed barge Atlantis, that looked like it had installed a power station on its deck...

but it was just an optical illusion, which passed as quickly as it had appeared.

A few kilometres later, we pulled into the port at Aramon for the night. In trying to fix her tyres, Rita had busted both new tubes, one by inflating far too much and the other for some unexplained reason. So she rode into town on my bike looking for a cycle shop; but she returned soon thereafter, with a flat tyre on my bike now!! In checking the tyres on her bike and mine, we found some thorns that had penetrated the tyre, and we suspect that these might have come from our aborted ride on the beach earlier this week in Frontignan.

Since it was still quite warm, Rita decided to go for a swim in the Rhone. But the water was colder than she thought, so the swim only lasted a few minutes. Still, one more thing to tick off on the bucket list!

Later in the evening, several large barges passed by, but even this double container-barge with pusher made relatively small waves by the time they reached us. Hopefully, however, there won’t be too many of them during the night.

Given our experience with the winds in Frontignan earlier this week, we have become fairly regular at checking weather forecasts, and have seen that signifiant rain is forecast for the weekend and early next week. So we are re-thinking our plans to stay in Avignon for a few days over the weekend. We’ll see what the weather brings tomorrow.