We were up early in an attempt to make up for time lost yesterday, with the intention of getting to the large port at Valence.

Since we hadn’t seen the Capitainerie yesterday, we left the money for the Capitainerie for our extra day’s mooring with Albert, a port “regular”. Today, another tourist boat, "Lippy McLipFace", was moored as we left port at 0825h in the morning mist. We left the Dutch couple in port behind us, as workmen started to take apart the pontoons in the private section of the port.

Just two kms upstream, we reached the Chateauneuf Ecluse, where the control centre HQ is located for all 14 Rhone Locks. The curved rear gate was impressive as it slid downwards into place.

But we were straight in and out of the lock, despite its size. We emerged from the lock into a strong northerly wind, which whipped up some waves on the river as we approached the Cruas Nuclear Power Station. This was the roughest stretch of water we had yet encountered, but it caused no concern.

The Cruas Nuclear Cooling Tower is (in)famous for the painting of the small child, in an attempt to soften its image. However, as we were cruising past, Rita was narrating a case study that she was learning about in her course, of a small girl (called S in the story) who was deaf, dumb and mentally challenged, but who responded to a long patient treatment by a music therapist. Whenever I see this tower in the future, I shall always think of The Story of S.

As we cruised along, I came to understand more fully why people refer to the Rhone Valley, as the river snaked its way between hills and mountains on both sides.

As always along the Rhone, we were accompanied by the Swans.

As we prepared to enter Ecluse Beauchastel at PK124, we got ready for action by donning our life jackets, which are compulsory wearing in all Rhone locks.

We were all alone in the lock for the third time today. But, as we rose at Beauchastel, it sounded and felt like we were trapped in the lock with a pod of whales!!

As we approached Valence, we were passed by a loaded gravel barge Condor on its way south. It was very low in the water, and created quite a bow wave.

However, Kanumbra handled the 1m waves well, and gave some confidence that it would handle poor weather conditions on the bigger rivers quite easily.

We arrived at the Port of Valence by 1520h - much earlier than expected. We first stopped at the fuel station, and filled up with 372L of gazole. Given that we had done 95 engine hours since our last fill at Moissac, this equated to 3.9L/hour, which was less than the 5L/hour that I had been using in all my calculations.

We then moved across to the nearest hammerhead mooring on Pontoon 1. However, after we had tied up, we noticed a bloated coypu floating just behind us. I tried moving it away by using the engine and rudder, while tied to the pontoon, but the wind and the current coming in from the river kept moving it back towards us.

So before it became an exploding coypu, we changed from the end of the 1st pontoon to the end of the 3rd pontoon to avoid the pong. We then walked up and checked in with the Capitainerie - who were very helpful with information about the port and the town. The view from the Capitainerie office gives a good idea of the size of the Port of Valence.

We then walked 2km to the nearest shopping centre (since both our bikes still had flat tyres), and the quantity of the purchases were very much dictated by how much we could carry!

In the evening, we were joined by a swan friend as we had a back deck apero in the sun, followed by pasta.