Our escape from the current of Avignon made us determined to find a nice, easy and quiet mooring for the night, so we headed back down the Rhone proper towards a spot on the right bank which we'd been told had a brand new mooring. So new in fact it wasn't on any maps or in the guide books yet.

On the rivers and canals you always know exactly where you are thanks to the "PK"s, the Point Kilometre signposts that tell you the exact distance you are from the last major port. In our case this was Lyon, and at PK 254.5 Richard and Sophie the week before had discovered a new mooring called Du Pont du Gard, which they described as "smashing".

We'd already been smashed at Vienne, but assumed in this case they meant the mooring looked good. It was certainly new, gleamingly new, with room for (by my guess) around 25 boats of our size, or almost double that angle-parked. There were power and water supply points, and the design of the pontoons meant that the outside arm should protect the major inner pontoon from passing boat wash. Smaller boats could even moor further inside that with even more protection.

And yet, it was deserted. Not a single boat. It was the Marie Celeste of pontoons. We couldn't believe it, so chose what looked like a safe spot and tied up. There was no Capitanerie, and we assumed the electricity wouldn't be on so didn't bother plugging in. We also discovered that the gate at the top of the linkway to the shore was locked, so assumed that the mooring, though new, had been completed just in time to close for winter. Still, that didn't seem to prevent anyone using it, and we unfolded our chairs and put them right on the end of the pontoon, overlooking the absolutely calm Rhone slowly drifitng past, and watched fish jump and bats flit over our heads. (That's not to say the fish jumped over our heads...)

Once again we felt grateful to have survived Liberty's eagerness to go with the flow earlier in the day, and looked forward to continuing the journey next day when we would aim for the old Roman town of Arles.

Except it would turn out to be even less welcoming than Avignon.

The night passed relatively uneventfully, though during the evening two or three hotel boats went by, and some other traffic during the night, but nothing serious. Nothing to keep us a wake.

Next morning we set off for Arles, where the fluvial guide indicated we could expect pontoon mooring in the centre of town. Not so. When we arrived, all we could find was high stone quays - admittedly with mooring rings in them - but so high as to be useless for our bateau plaisance. It looked like whatever pontoon there was had been taken away, and despite intense scrutiny we couldn't find anywhere safe or convenient to tie up, so reluctantly retraced our steps back upstream to where the Petit Rhone branched off and followed that.

Instant change. The boating environment went from wide flowing Rhone to narrow ultra-calm river, bordered by trees on both banks, sometimes in a Tolkienesque way fingering their way into the water as though intent on trapping your propeller. There was hardly any discernable flow, the sun was out, and there was no wind. The waterway also meandered a lot more than its big brother, which made it more interesting. We put one of the chairs up the bow and took turns sitting in the prime position.

We made good progress, and reached the St Gilles lock - almost a joke of a lock after some of the giants we'd been in. This one had a drop of only a metre or so - tchah - but we had to share it with two of the dreaded hotel boats. Still, it all worked out fine. We let them go in first and let them exit first... that's the appropriate etiquette. Anyway, they always go faster than we do so it's sensible to let them have priority. We followed them for a short while and then turned right up the Canal du Rhone a Sete, which - finally after all this time - was our first real canal, as opposed to a river.

The change was obvious, both in terms of the width of the waterway and the depth; neither allowed any room for complacency. We had gone from the Rhone, ranging from up to 15 metres deep and what seemed like a kilometre wide in parts, to this canal which was sometimes only just over one metre deep and about 30 metres wide, often less. It also meant travelling more slowly, as the maximum allowable speed is around eight kph. But that's not so bad... the point of boating like this should be to go slowly and enjoy the environment, not rush through it seething at speed restrictions.

And so in stately fashion we reached the small town of St Gilles, a wild-west town of Tijuana Brass, untold cafes and bars, with a Wild West nature and gendarmes who have been to the Starsky and Hutch School of Driving...