The Gollywobler - the quen among sails

What is a code zero, spinnaker or genua - nothing compared to the gollywobler.
A gollywobler is hoisted on the fore mast of a scooner and sheeted to the top of the main mast and to the deck.

We saw this boat in Bonifacio strait.

Some locks are small and some are the biggest in the world

When going on the Rhone all the locks are big. They are all about 180 m by 12 m and the height varies from 10 to 23 m.which is 49.680.000 litre of water. The Bollene lock was the biggest in the world when it was built.

Up the river Rhone

We heared rumours about the strong current in the river. People usually dramatise and tell how bad things are. We started out and the first part up past Arles to Beaucaire took us a day and we averaged about 3 knots which is ok. The next day it was worse. Now the current was up to five knots and in certain stretches we were down to .7 knots. The old ladies with wheel chairs overtook us. Not a very funny day. We were working our ways for about 12 hours each day. But we reached Lyon and had done the worst part.

Everything breaks down!

As we had a leaking propeller shaft when arriving to Monastir we put the boat on the hard and changed the sealings and was happy that we solved the problem. But we hadn't! when crossing to Sardinia it started to leak even worse, then the electric bilge pump failed, the Navionics charts stopped working and the forestay to the main mast  broke.. We pumped manually and navigated with 15 years old charts but finally we reached Olbia where we bought a new bilgepump and a lot of grease for the propeller shaft. We contiued up along the east coast of Sardinia and Corse and crossed to Ile de Porquerolles and reached Port St Louis where we once againg put the boat on the hard. The men driving the travel lift remembered us from 2010!! - they dropped us accidately.
Now we bought a new stuffing box and took down the masts. The Navionics charts started to work after a new release of the app.
Everything was back in good order again.