Getting warm!

10 May 2008 evening
Snork Maiden
Le Depot

Bonsoir tout le monde

I have had a busy day – getting ready to put the anti-fouling paint on the bottom of the boat tomorrow. For those of you who don’t know, this stuff has to be renewed every year, since its job is to deter marine life – barnacles and stuff - from growing below the waterline. It’s designed to waste away so has to be re-applied before the boat goes back into the water. It’s also toxic, so have to dress up in paper suit, gloves, mask and goggles to sand down the old stuff and paint on the new. Preparation is a bit of a bore, but painting part is quite good. Best that the weather isn’t too hot and it’s been just right today with an easterly wind but no rain – well, just a very few drops.
Now it is 9.30pm – still light. I have had a shower at the harbour – first one since the ferry and I smelt like a monkey after that hard work. Also had fish soup, salad and a glass of Muscadet at the Café Thalassa. Cooking on the boat is a pain – all washing-up has to be carried to the tap. The area around the boat is quite muddy after this afternoon’s efforts. Yard hoses often don’t have taps and are left running. The other yards we have wintered in were a bit better outfitted, but this one is cheap, quiet and close to the town. I also have the wonderful pink bike, with newly inflated tyres, bought at a flea market for 20 € last year. I’ll be quite sorry to leave it behind, but didn’t bring the bike rack, so I suppose I will have to pass it on. Or maybe I will leave it here in case we winter at the Depot again.
I don’t like to generalise about the French, but I do admire the casual way they get close to nature wherever they happen to find it, even when it’s in a car park, next to a building site, wherever. And they do get out of their cars, set up the picnic table and seem to have a good time. My other observation is that they seem somehow less aspirational than their British counterpart. (Hey, my Brit spellchecker doesn’t know that word. That’s surprising!) I may have said this to some of you before, but one of the reasons we feel very comfortable in Brittany is that the majority of French boats are pretty much like ours – small, and often more than 20 years old.
In Britain many of the yacht marinas are determinedly moving upmarket. The availability of cheap moorings is limited, and yachting is becoming the province of generously pensioned retirees, and blokes into business and often into racing too. (Nothing wrong with that, but it’s a different world from cruising.) It’s a very different picture from the heyday of small family boats in the 1960s and ‘70s. While I’m at it, the 1960’s (as well as inventing sex & rock music) saw a real growth in sailing. Records were broken from the North Atlantic to New Zealand; people built Mirror dinghies in their back gardens with marine plywood and a stapler for a few hundred quid. Of course, now there’s surfing and windsurfing, and aargh – jet skis, all better suited to busy working lives. Interesting how things change.


In response to popular demand, I am going to try some pix of the boatyard, Marans and me. Watch this space. (Yesterday’s pic was the sunset as seen from the back of the boat.) Now after 10pm so definitely bedtime. Big day tomorrow. Will try to deal with anti-fouling and my friend the 20hp Bukh engine. Only filters, so I tell myself that there’s nothing to be scared about.
As the columnists say, Jenny is listening to: BBC Podcasts, the Mighty Boosh, Johnny Cash, Fairport Convention and Blondie. She is watching Larry Sanders shows and the Boosh on DVD. She’s reading On Chesil Beach and Treason’s Harbour (Patrick O’Brian of ‘Master and Commander, for you landlovers).If you like quotations, try this:
‘Smoothe runnes the Water, where the Brooke is deepe.
And in his simple shew he harbours Treason.’
2 Henry VI

1230 Sunday
Sunny, twenty something degrees

Antifouling finished. The one-coat wonder worked very well. Doesn’t drip but not too hard to work the roller. We’ll see how it looks at the end of September. Best time to do is morning before the sun gets too hot and dazzles you on one side of the boat. Today was perfect and the masking tape is already off. (Still some nasty marks on the waterline from previous less-successful years.
I took a photograph although it was a battle with exposure, the boat, me and the sky all very bright. Now having a cuppa and a breather before deciding exactly what to do next. Lunch seems like a possibility.