Port

Meillerie

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Maximum length: 36 ft
Maximum draught: 8 ft

Small lakeside harbour on the south shore of Lake Geneva, French Chablais, opposite Lausanne.

Guide

Approach and anchoring

Entrance from the north, between two short breakwaters. 140 berths, maximum draught 2.7 m. About five visitor berths lie near the entrance, made fast to the dock on a lazy line clipped to a ground chain at bow and stern. The south shore of the lake is deep close in; the Dents d'Oche rise directly behind the village to 2,222 m. Watch for the Vaudaire, a violent southeasterly fall wind that funnels along this shore. Nights here are quiet. No tides. VHF not required on the lake.

Practical

Berths year-round, the lake does not freeze at this depth. Water and electricity on the pontoons, though the power is not always live. Pay for the berth on the evening of arrival to avoid an early call for the fee, and ask for the shower code by text message. A restaurant sits at the harbour; the village has no shops, so Evian 5.4 NM to the west covers full provisioning and fuel.

Ashore

Former quarries of Meillerie, worked for Alpine limestone since Roman times and used to pave parts of Geneva and Lausanne. Sentier des Contrebandiers footpath along the shore. Evian and its thermal springs 10 km west by road.

History

The village was made famous by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in La Nouvelle Heloise, 1761, where Saint-Preux meditates on the Meillerie rocks. Byron and Shelley rowed across from Ouchy in 1816 to visit the site and were nearly wrecked in a squall, an episode Byron recounted in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage.