Birvidik

"What do you do all day?", ask the uninitiated with tedious regularity. Well, judging by recent events, our days are filled to overflowing with getting into trouble, getting out of trouble, clearing up the mess that trouble had left behind, and writing long, rambling blogs detailing the aforementioned trouble.

These last few weeks, for example, have been so bounteously blessed with disasters that I haven't had time to draw breath, let alone put finger to keyboard and record them on the blogosphere.

The shower drain-pump finally gave in on the unequal struggle with our combined bodily detritus, gave out a defiant, gurgled death-rattle and gave up the ghost. We managed to hit a boat as we were attempting to moor up in a strong current in Chalon, an offence that was punished even unto the fourth fold by subsequent arrivals. I got myself comprehensively de-walleted by a resident gang of young, female pickpockets on the Lyon metro and the piece de resistance was to run up on a reef and find ourselves stuck high and dry for three days.

Any of these could warrant a blog in its own right, but I'm going to have to prioritise here, so I'm going for the 'Last In - First Out' principle. Hence - the grounding it is.

Those of you with long attention spans and even longer memories, will recall that over the whole eight years of our travels on the inland waterways, we have been plagued by low water levels. Whole sections have been closed, available depths reduced to critical, and widths shrunk too small to allow two vessels to pass.

"Not this year!" we crowed. "This year we're going down The Rhône. That's not going to run out of water."

Bloody right it's not.

Two thousand and twenty-four is on course for record rainfall in Europe. Canals and rivers are now being closed because there's too much of the bloody stuff. Calm, placid backwaters have been transformed into raging torrents, reducing headroom on bridges, eroding levées, bursting banks, and flooding towns, fields, roads, railways, and nuclear power stations.

The Rhône, though, has (so far, at least) escaped the worst of this. However, it's not the benign somnolent giant that it usually is this time of the year; water levels are rising, and flow rates are increasing in step.

Ah yes - flow rates.

I learnt to sail in the Channel Islands, as I never tire of boasting to anyone who'll listen (or anyone who won't, for that matter). "I've transited the Alderney Race." I proclaim with smug, quietly understated hubris.

The Alderney Race? - Hah!

The Alderney Race can do eight knots downhill with the wind behind it. That's near as spit ten kilometres per hour. The Rhône can do that before breakfast, and that's without changing into flood mode. The Race spreads this speedy turbulence out over an area the size of Maidstone, leaving loads of space to bagatelle, bounce, and bugger about in. The Rhone funnels the same current through spaces the size of a football pitch and enhances the challenge with a liberal scattering of dykes, barrages, groynes, weirs, disused locks, floating forestry, and submerged walls. Head upstream and you'll be chucking out smoke like a Maltese bus and still be lucky to overtake someone on the towpath crawling on hands and knees over broken glass. Head downstream and you'll burn a thimble-full of diesel a fortnight, but you'll have the steering response and manoeuvrability of a lawnmower on a black run at Obergurgl.

The real killer, though, is when you to try to turn round.

It's geometry - you can't get around it. At some point, you have to end up side-on to the current. In this position, you are travelling sideways at three metres per second and have about as much control over the boat as Miss Goadeasy, the supply teacher, has over set 10-feral near the end of double maths on Friday afternoon.

Which brings us to The Unpleasantness at Cruas.

Cruas is an interesting, and convenient little stop between Valence and Viviers. Its approach and entry, though, require knowledge, preparation, skill, and consummate boatmanship, as well as calm, measured consideration, good weather, and an inordinate amount of luck.

Well, five out of seven ain't bad.

The pilot is quite detailed on the approach to Cruas, as well it might be. The channel runs East to West, which puts it at 90 degrees to the current. Good game, good game. To further complicate matters, it is situated in a narrowing of the river, which increases the flow and produces chaotic eddies. Downstream of the entrance, there is an extensive area of hazards - reefs, rocks, groynes and a submerged wall, all marked off by thundering great concrete pillar spars. Just to put the cherry on the top, the channel is only twenty metres wide, and the water is about as transparent as a chocolate milkshake.

Oh - and the echosounder is accurate +/- about ten feet.

So, in essence, your problem reads as follows: (You may turn over your papers now)

You have the con of a boat, length 12.5 metres, beam 4 metres, draft 1.4 metres, gross laden weight 18 tonnes, engine 135 H.P. You are to manoeuvre your vessel through an entrance channel 20 metres wide, running at 90 degrees to a current of ten kilometres per hour. You will be free of the current once past the green spar to starboard. (100 marks)

Marks will be awarded for unscathed entry, style, panache, and a plausible pretence of confidence.
Marks will be deducted for:
Whimpering pathetically: (- 2 marks)
Screaming uncontrollably: (-3 marks)
Urinary incontinence: (-5 marks)
Double incontinence: (-7 marks) (+ 2 skid marks)
Crashing: (- 10 marks)
Running aground: (-10 marks)
Running hard aground: (-12 marks)
Running really hard aground: (-15 marks)
Writing off the propellor (- 10 marks per blade)
Writing off the rudder (- 20 marks)
Punching a hole in the hull: (-25 marks)
Sinking: (-150 marks)

Negative scores are permitted.


Things started off according to plan. Liz is an accomplished helmswoman, far superior to me. She controls the boat with the finesse, accuracy, and attention to detail of an Olympic dressage finalist.

We were coming with the current, so phase one was to go well past the entrance, turn round where there was plenty of manoeuvring room, and crawl back up against the current - nice and slow with plenty of steerage. As we approached the channel entry point, stomachs tightening, Liz took a deep breath and went for it, full ahead and wheel hard over to port, aiming to follow the pilot's stern instructions to pass as close to the green upstream marker spar as possible.

"Right,10-Feral, here's your Friday afternoon challenge"

The current is running North to South at 10kph. If Liz lines up for the channel as far upstream and close to the green spar as depth allows, use v=s/t to calculate how long she has before the current carries her the 21 metres onto the opposite shoal.

"Surprisingly, that's right, Nero Divers, - 7 ½ seconds."

Well that's not going to work is it? She'd have the boat balanced on a rocky spike like a fairy on a Christmas tree before you could say 'Loss Adjuster'.

Luckily, she has another trick up her raglan helmswoman's sleeve, namely the Ferry-glide. This is easier to explain graphically, but this platform doesn't support graphics, so we'll give it a go verbally.

Imagine looking down on the boat, which is positioned at the centre of a clock face. The current, if left to its own nefarious devices, will carry it to 6 o'clock and its associated shoals etc:

↓

Point the boat to 12 o'clock and give it just the right amount of power & you're not going anywhere:

↨

Ease the rudder over to about 10:30, ↖, throttle up by exactly the right amount, et voila! - you
beetle off to nine o'clock, straight through the entrance channel:

←

So she did, and had us trogging straight down the channel, hugging the upstream edge, as strongly recommended by the pilot. We started to breathe again. Safety, comfort, food, drink and adulation beckoned enticingly. We turned and smiled at each other.

Remember that seemingly encouraging note from the pilot; 'You will be free of the current once past the green spar to starboard'. We hadn't really thought through the full implications of that seemingly innocuous piece of information. Being conventional little souls, we were going forwards. This meant that the bow would get into the lee of the current first, while the stern would remain subject to its full force. The resulting gross imbalance of forces caused Birvidik to execute a sharp right turn. Eighteen tonnes of boat, travelling at 10 kph, has 4 times the energy of an assault rifle bullet at point-blank range. There was no way to stop it. Birvidik ploughed into the rocky, overgrown spit. The bow rose up the ballast of the spit, parted the brush and scrub, and came to rest like a stranded whale, the pulpit nestled in a bush, less than a metre from the green spar.

That close enough for you?