Snork Maiden redux

Saturday, August 29, 2009 QF1, The bench, Forty T-bags, In praise of older boats St Martin QF1 is the number of our berth against the visitor’s pontoon in the floating (west) section of the harbour at St Martin. I think I’ve said that it gets busy here, with up to 25 yachts packing into an area only slightly larger than they are, with lots of movements in and out every day. We’re lucky with our neighbours, who are very quiet, apart from elephant-ing across the deck and kicking the jib sheet cars (metal pulley things that bang on the deck) every single time. The other acoustic hazard is late-night teenagers who start up around midnight. There are sweet wooden benches around the harbour. The angle of view is such that the occupants of the bench appear in the starboard side window above the galley, as if framed for cinemascope. At neaps (when tidal differences are small) we only see faces; at springs (when high tides are higher, and low tides lower) we can see full bodies. So the be...

Wednesday, August 26, 2009 St Martin de Re There must be an official word for port-bound, but I don’t know what it is! Since the last blog a lots seems to have happened. We came in to St Martin on Thursday evening. I had forgotten just what it’s like when the harbour gate opens. It was like a stampede on water when around a dozen boats come out of absolutely nowhere and converged on the bottleneck of the harbour mouth. I’d also forgotten that before boats can go in, the outgoing boats have to leave. There was a never ending parade of them, so the waiting boats have to play a ghastly game that is a cross between musical chairs and ‘what’s the time Mister Wolf?’ (Only in this case, the Wolf is played by “La Maline” - the huge white ferry from La Rochelle that comes steaming in, taking no prisoners.) See, the problem is that boats, unlike cars, have no handbrakes, and can’t just sit on the spot.. They have to tie up to something solid, on land or water, or else keep up a flying Dut...

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 woul...

Wednesday, August 19, 2009 On the Canal in Marans So here we are back on Snork Maiden, hoping to leave this afternoon. We arrived via Easy Jet to La Rochelle on Sunday, schlepping around 70Kg of luggage between us - no wheelies since they don’t fit on the boat very well. After a couple of hours dozing and reading under a tree in Place Verdun, we caught the local bus to Marans then struggled into town. (Taxi apparently on holiday). Our favourite café was open and so we stopped for a drink and met a nice Belgian man, attracted by Al’s guitar, which they got out and played for a bit. By that time it had cooled down a bit, and so we set off on the second section of the route march, only to be caught up by Belgian Derek on his bike, offering to load up our heaviest bags and wheel them down to the boat. So he did, and we arrived without any major joint dislocations. Snork Maiden was fine - of course. It always takes us a couple of days to get ready - packing the boat, flushing tanks...