Snork Maiden redux

Thursday, June 26, 2008 Snork Maiden Boyardville, Ile d’Oleron Fort Boyard, Sea, Sticks and Rags The weather has turned into summer. We wake up to sunshine and blue skies, and the evenings are long and clear. Sometimes cloud in the middle of the day, but that’s good since the sun is mid-summer strong. There are good beaches on Oleron, but it tends to be windy - that’s how come La Rochelle is such a good sailing place. We arrived in Boyardville a couple of days ago. Bodyarville is a small holiday village on an old canal leading into the marshy are of the island. It would have started life as an island but now its big attraction is the beach, the small marina with restaurants clustered around it - and Fort Boyard. It was a perfect sailing day when we arrived so we sailed a circuit of the fort. We were approached by a 3rd assistant director in a RIB (rigid inflatable boat with a large outboard engine). He asked us very politely to sail away out of shot, and sure enough, we could s...

Monday, June 23, 2008 Maiden Snork Rochefort River Charente This morning we had a visitor - there will be a picture if I don’t run out of time! This is a quick blog due to an expensive time limited wifi connection! We spent a couple of nights on a buoy off Ile d’Aix at the weekend and came up the River Charente yesterday. Ile d’Aix is a few miles from La Rochelle and Al’s mother has childhood memories of visiting the island so he was keen to re-visit it. We hired bikes with funny wide handlebars and no gears! There is a lot of shade from pines, but not much in the way of swimming beaches. There was a huge wedding going on with lots of uncomfortably hot people in suits and small children crying. Our second night was interesting - an electric storm in the early hours of the morning then a 0730 take off next morning for the Charente river. It was high tide so the bar (shallow bit) almost un-noticeable except for a slight ruffle in the water. The river flowed fast but was very prett...

Thursday, June 19, 2008 Le Vieux Port La Rochelle The tower on the right of the picture is the 'Chain Tower', so called because a chain was stretched across the harbour mouth to keep the English out. Now Easy Jet has engineered a more permanent invasion. Rafting & Racing Well, Snork Maiden is getting restless and I think we are off tomorrow. There are a lot of English in La Rochelle and several English boats on our pontoon. When there is not enough space for all the visiting boats to go alongside – parallel to the pontoon, they have to go alongside each other. That means a sort of floating caravan park, where you have only about 6 inches between your caravan and the next, and your neighbours have to climb over your roof to get out. It also means that you might be sleeping closer to someone else’s spouse than you are to your own. Boats are more soundproof than tents so it’s rare to hear snoring. There is a kind of etiquette by which you always walk around your neighbou...

Wednesday, June 18, 2008 La Rochelle La Renommee Café It’s busy in La Rochelle with ferries coming and going, lots of regattas and sailing schools to play dodgems with! Not an internet café but a corner café at the unfashionable end of the port, close to a building site! I was on my way to the showers – 3 yacht basins away from where we are so a bit inconvenient for the loo – when I saw 4 or 5 blokes letting themselves in to the shiny aluminium building that houses the 1 or 2 toilets and showers that seemingly serve the several hundred berths here. So I thought I’d give it a miss, at least for a while. As I’ve already mentioned, facilities here can be a bit intimate. Weather today is cloudy – although promised to be sunny and hot. The people who give out the sailing Meteo are still on strike. So off to the Internet place (NOT a café) to post this and trawl the wwweather. We might stay in La R another day. Al’s enjoying it here – it’s an interesting city with lots to see includ...

Sunday, June 15, 2008 Snork Maiden Minimes, La Rochelle There is something different about the homeless in La Rochelle. They are much less meek than the British sort and never advise you to ‘Gob less’ or say anything at all, actually. They are older and remind me more of the Orwellian style of tramp. I saw a street scene a couple of days ago that would have made a great verite clip. A very well dressed woman, stout, middle-aged, smart in a cream suit with an asymmetrically cut jacket and gold jewellery was face to face in profile with one of the bums, both slightly leaning into frame. I had them in profile, too far away to hear. The man, in his 60s maybe, was also stout, seated wearing a baseball cap and with a small box or bowl on the pavement in front of him (I have never seen any explanatory signs). The woman was clearly engaging him in discussion, but not, apparently, abusing him – it looked more like a debate in which they were both engaged and interested. She repeatedly p...

June 11 2008-06-11 Snork Maiden La Rochelle I have been absent from the keyboard for a while – hands-on with sheets, halyards, winches, sails and all those other delightful nautical bits and pieces. I have also been reading one of the Patrick O’Brian novels (as in the film Master and Commander). For those of you who are not avid readers of the series, the novels feature a naval captain, Jack Aubrey, and his not at all nautically inclined friend, Stephen Maturin, ship’s surgeon, musical partner and ‘particular friend’ of Jack’s. The background is ongoing naval warfare and political alliances around the Napoleonic Wars. I don’t bear any resemblance to the huge, red-faced Jack, and apart from the music, Al’s not much like Stephen. Snork Maiden is certainly not a bit like a naval sloop, apart from the fact that oddly, they both travel at about the same speed. Snork Maiden does better to windward. We do not carry cannons or bad tempered personal servants, although, come to think of i...

Snork Maiden St Denis d’Oleron Sunday, June 1, 2008 Seems ages since the last (b)log. We left Marans (finally) on Thursday 29th, around 1130 to catch the high tide at 1230. I thought it took an hour – I am sure it did when I came in with Carol last year, but then we were probably idling, looking at the birds and making a video (well, Carol did). Anyway we were clearly early for the lock so we idled around and enjoyed the morning – sunny, peaceful. After the lock, and the lifting road bridge, we got into the wind-ey bit of the river, saw the first channel markers and smelt diesel. I had a look at the engine and saw a big pool of diesel in the bilge under the engine. We moored up on a waiting buoy and I thought it was something to do with the filter I had changed, had a go at tightening it up (probably making it worse), bailed it out, and carried on into La Rochelle. Wind on the nose, so motored around to La Rochelle Minimes, home to 3500 white plastic yachts (and a few more interest...