GETTING THERE

(B)log Thursday, May 14, 2009

SORRY NO PIX - HAVING PROBLEMS WITH UPLOAD

Well, here we are again - the Snork Maiden and me. It always takes a day to adjust to life aboard, especially when she’s out of the water. (I will put some yard pix on Picasa tomorrow.) The horses and frogs don’t seem to be here, but there’s lots of birdsong morning and evening.

Just to back up, I came over on the ferry Tuesday night. Usually the boat (from Plymouth to Roscoff) is an elderly vessel, the Pont Aven. She’s a bit lived in, and the cheap cabins were situated somewhere below the car decks, next to the engines. The deep throb used to send me to sleep - just as well, since the partitions between cabins were not up to the ceiling, and there was no barrier to noisy sleepers, kids, or party animals. The bathrooms were communal, but you were never far away from an exit route! (Think Poseidon.)

The new ferry - the Armorique, named for Brittany’s Cote d’Armor (not ‘amour’) is the exact opposite. She’s much more a floating hotel. Because I had changed my sailing just a couple of days before leaving, I had to book into ‘club class’ with a 4-person cabin to myself. A porthole comes with it, but not much to see on a night crossing, once the Plymouth outer breakwater slides past. As some of you know, I have strongly developed survival instincts and I always check out the escape routes. These are fewer on the Armorique. There are 3 ‘muster stations’ that you should head for. These give onto exits that have to be opened by the crew, and they are all in open areas, like the bars. I prefer the outside route that leads directly to the lifeboats, and it took me about 20 minutes to work it out, including counting the number of doors and flights of stairs I had to negotiate. Probably fewer than half a dozen passangers would do that, and nothing on the boat encourages them to do so. The back-of-cabin-door instructions were fairly impenetrable and as it was there were many bemused middle-aged-and-more couples looking for their cabins, or the bar, or the stairs back to their car. (On the old Pont Aven there were nice crew on the car decks, handing out little bits of paper with the car’s location handwritten on them. On the plus side, the buffet looked OK and the cabin, en suite de rigeur, was very good, with comfy bed and decent shower. (My tip for a sound sleep is pinch a second duvet from another bunk, and lie on that. Just like a feather bed.

I suppose you want to get to France now. OK. Grey day in Brittany. There are 2 problems immediately after disembarking - finding the quickest route to Morlaix (there seem to be several) and finding somewhere to go to the loo. (Digestive system still on UK time; France 1 hour ahead. I know that they both sound simple, but believe me…
You’ll be glad to know that I solved at least the second of these, thanks to M. Le Clerc. But I was so desperate that I almost forgot the pleasantries…. “Bonjour Madam, les toilettes, s’il vous plait.” “Aaargh - montez moi les bogs MAINTENANT.”
It took me most of the day to get to Marans, with more stops than usual to walk about a bit for my back. I had a couple of naps too, arriving here after 5. Dominic, the yard patron, was there when I arrived but he managed to slip off home before I could extract a long electricity cable from his messy and disorganised system. (There’s an Aussie guy here who describes Dominic as ‘slack’ and I guess that covers it.)
The good news - I DO have electricity now, although the cable is pretty open to the weather and I’ll be lucky if it survives the heavy showers we’re getting tonight. And the lift back into the water is booked for Wednesday.

Tomorrow I think I will take the outboard motor to La Rochelle to be serviced. Then I’ll get on with preparing the hull for anti-fouling in the afternoon. Hope the OK weather holds - it has been T-shirt warm in the day and pretty cosy at night in my sleeping bag.

I bought a merino wool long-sleeved top before leaving, and it’s fantastic. Warm, not scratchy, non-stinky. And before you point out that this is my year of not buying clothes, this is a piece of technical equipment!

Time to get my bunk clear and into sleeping mode. Although I have an electric light, there’s just one, and it’s easiest to finish up in daylight (dark around 10pm).

Night all, wherever you are.