We had expected to meet up with friends in St Denis however they had left a couple of days before. St Denis is a great stopover and one of the few places in the Charente where you can get fuel alongside. In August however it is moules central (see blogs passim!) and over-run by tourists. Although we could have stayed free on the third day, the weather forecast made it sensible to leave and slalom up the river to Rochefort.
A spring tide meant that the moorings off the île d'Aix were high and dry, preventing a planned stop for lunch and would have made us arrive early at the river bar. The ebb was running against a westerly and, like the Gironde, this causes dangerous over-falls for the first couple of miles. Slowing down did the trick however and we ran up the river under sail at the turn of the tide with big following seas helping us along nicely, whizzing past the historical Vauban structures that line the approaches to Rochefort. We only had a couple of metres under us over the bar itself, being a catamaran has some advantages.......
We sailed up the Charente so quickly that our usual stopover at Soubise came and went and we carried on under sail round the twists and turns all the way to Rochefort, tying up for the evening outside the sea lock and going ashore to see friends David and his wife Liz on Sega
Locking into the harbour the next morning was like coming home, with so many familiar friendly faces and they gave us a berth in the inner harbour, which was great for the laundry, shops and the railway station. That night we joined our friends for a great birthday dinner for Liz at Olivers moules restaurant on the quayside, complete with ukulele singsong!