As we turned towards the Grande Rade, a sleek ocean race boat was coming into port at the same time. It was very cool and looked like it could sail non stop around the world but potentially lacked most of the mod cons we were enjoying.
The port of Toulon was behind a long break water where the Petite Rade was located, and had a wide stone board walk with restaurants, bars, cafe’s, and tourist shops. There were about 4 large marina’s here, with Port Pin Rolland being in the south corner diagonally opposite the main downtown area. There was a large Navy presence as apparently Toulon has the 2nd largest Navy after Brest. There were some mussel or oyster farms in a couple of places with shacks on stilts built over the pilings which would have made a night-time arrival challenging.
Todd navigated us over towards Port Pin Rolland and raised the Port Captain over the VHF, and we were directed to D quay beside a Lagoon 45. As it was afternoon the breeze had filled in which caused our catamaran to have a fair bit of windage. (The price you pay for having great natural light and views from the salon.) Todd did a magical job of getting us turned stern too in the narrow fairway and into the slip with fenders deployed all around. (Except the one that got away and I subsequently retrieved from the anchorage in the dinghy after we were tied up, as it was totally my fault). There was a little fender rubbing on the downwind side but the nice fellow on the up wind side gave us a hand with the stern lines and showed us the bowline retrieval attached to a dock cleat. In Canet we would deploy the dinghy and go forward to pass the bow lines through the eye of the mooring buoy, but this was a lot easier. Allrighty, we did a quick boat spray off and thorough inside clean, then set up the guest berth before hiking off to the closest supermarket for provisions.
Oh, and here again there was the distinct sound of cicadas that we were now associating with Provence. (https://curiousrambler.com) We had showers aboard although observed more than one sailor come back after a day of sailing and shower with a hose on the dock, topless ladies and Speedo clad guys. It was nice to be somewhere new with different views and activity. It got very busy with returning vessels between 6-8 pm and all the mono-hulls backed the full length of the fairway to get to their slips, still going a good clip. It was an early night as Mark and Michele were due in the next day around 2 pm after landing in the Toulon -Hyeres airport at noon.