Roberta and I have now left St Tropez, and are back at the villa we rented in Eze.
Before leaving St Tropez I stopped in at the port and grabbed their brochure. I also grabbed a brochure from a boat rental company.
To see the brochures, CLICK HERE
When looking at the brochures for the boats, if you really want shocked, convert the prices to dollars by multiplying by 1.5 (100 euros = $150 US Dollars!)
Also, note how they differentiate between boats that can be rented with, or without a license (avec permis, sans permis). Without a boat license you are effectively limited to a row boat…
And.. yesterday, I was having an offline discussion with another Nordhavn owner about med mooring, and shared the following embarrassing moment from my past (adding to my grief, we had guests on board at the time)…
There are “mooring lines” (usually about ¼ inch line) which run from the quai down along the bottom of the marina, along the side of your boat, to a chain, which is fastened to the bottom of the center of the marina. To med moor, you back to the wall, and then you walk the mooring line to the front of the boat, where you use a winlass to pull up a chain, which is fastened to the center of the marina basin, and which will hold your bow.
We were leaving port, and I had let loose the chain holding my bow. It was windy, so I didn’t want to waste any time. I released the stern lines, and pulled forward. As I was out of the slip, I heard a horrible noise and the engines quit. I was blocking the center of the marina!
I hadn’t waited long enough for the mooring line to settle to the bottom, and it wrapped around my prop. In these marinas, the bottom is only one or two feet deeper than the boats (8’ depth at Beaulieu). And, there are ropes and chains running everywhere on the bottom. You can’t accelerate too much, or move too fast, or you’ll suck a rope – which I did.
I wrapped the chain around the prop shaft. It took a diver about four hours to get me untangled. In the mean time I had a lot of really unhappy French people who couldn’t enter or exit the marina.
Boating is never dull!
-Ken W