Time And Tide

Thursday, August 20, 2009
Off St Martin

Time And Tide

So here we are - we managed to leave Marans on time yesterday. We tied up in the lock - the only boat going out, but then a power boat roared up the canal and shot into the lock far too fast. Turned out to be Dominique who runs the yard where we have been wintering. He was en famille and entirely in control of his boat in a Dominique kind of way.

The plan was to go onto the visitor’s buoys at St Martin and leave early to get to Les Sables d’Olonne with a West wind before the North Westerly came in to spoil our fun. Well, we did the first part of the plan, but the leaving early part didn’t quite happen. I had hoped we would catch the 0703 weather forecast and then leave, but the forecast didn’t come and by the time we called Chassiron to get it repeated, found it’s now available continuously on VHF channel 63 and listened to it, it was all getting a bit late. The first part of the trip would have been have been fine, but we would have had a bit of a knock about in the NW wind which is exactly the direction we need to go. So we made the prudent decision to hang out until early afternoon when we can get into St Martin on the tide. There’s a harbour gate that opens for a few hours, around high water. (1445 today)
St Martin is a very pretty harbour with a market that sells oysters etc. It gets very busy in tourist season, with lots of restaurants, ice cream sellers, evening markets - all quite pricey - this is a rich island with Parisian’s parachuting in. There are some very classy holiday homes, hiding behind high walls. For us, there’s a small beach nearby, and we can top up the tanks with diesel so that we don’t need to stop at Les Sables unless we have another reason.
Last night was a bit noisy. Mooring buoys are good since you know they aren’t going to drag, but not so good in that they bang on the hull of the boat when the wind and the tide are not both going in the same direction. Since the tide turns every 6 hours, its going to be noisy quite a lot of the time. Imagine sitting in a Portacabin with a relentless teenager kicking a football against the wall, occasionally missing it. Yes, it’s like that.
Sorry that this blog is uni-media. Between us we managed to leave all the possible connecting leads for the camera and the digital recorder at home. I thought I had tracked one down in Super-U. Al opened the box and what I had though would be a friendly USB lead, turned out to be a weird extra-terrestrial one. I got on the pink bike, pedalled back to Super-U and ended up exchanging it for a nailbrush, deodorant and wishy-washy yellow towel, none of which is really useful for sending sounds and pix whizzing round the virtual world and onto a computer near you. I really would like you to share the sounds of Snork Maiden so maybe we’ll make a podcast for when we get home.
Al’s almost deserted his digi-recorder, having been quite seduced by his iphone and its many apps. Favourites are 4-track recorder, tuning fork, chart plotter and wind-speed meter (yes, really). Unfortunately the battery life is pretty pathetic, and it’s far too expensive to let it connect to the Internet.
He’s been recording potential hits this morning; I’ve been sitting on the foredeck re-stringing the safety lines with zigzags to stop the sails falling off the deck.
It’s 1255, wind speed 15Knots, wind direction W/NW, depth 16 feet, weather sun and high cloud, moon - none. Time for lunch, see you later, shipmates.