Walking into the wind

The mistral is blowing. No, not blowing, but howling, wailing, screaming through the rigging we have all around us (the night view below is taken from our apartment). In the loud parts, when the wind builds up speed, the clanking, rapping, tinkling, clanging and clacking of wire and metal sounds like a percussion section going hammer and tongs.

Port Napoleon from the road leading to the beach

The weather started to change yesterday, cloud blowing in from the north and humidity building. We were intending to drive to St Maries de la Mer, in the heart  of the Camargue national park,  but we missed the turning to the car ferry  across the Rhone  (below) and ended up driving alongside the river to Arles on a small road bordered by huge sunflower fields.  Going to town wasn’t a bad thing, not bad at all. I am prone to cabin fever, anywhere really but particularly in marinas.

  

  

It’s not only Avignon which is buzzing with artistes this summer. Every town in Provence seems to have its special festival. Even Martigues, a smallish town a bit east of here, with lovely watery light and several canals (hence the Venice of Provence tag), gets in on the festival act. Nothing much out of the ordinary was happening when we strolled through Martigues last Sunday afternoon, but because this is France, we wandered into a small museum, with a few Impressionist paintings, a startling contemporary exhibition, a few cases of pre-historic shards and vessels…Musee Ziem is dedicated to a prolific and long-lived minor painter called Felix Zeim who,  in the late 19^th century, took it into his head to add a mosque and a minaret to his house in Martigues.  Van Gogh liked the way Ziem painted blue, apparently. 

Tourist in Martigues 

Not quite Venice, but it's a canal

Back in Arles, they are going for music and photography festivals. I loved the way this exhibition  (below) was hung in the street, and the images too. 

There’s a big photo symposium happening in the union building. We loitered for an hour or so in there, and considered the multitude of questions being asked under the heading What Next?, (how the Europeans do love to work an idea down to the bone).  It’s good to focus the mind on what digital photography and the internet are doing and might yet do to and with the medium of Capa, Adams, Cartier Bresson and Kertesz - and Nemeth.

Also in Arles this week there’s a kind of world music festival, Les Suds, happening. I  had expected more people, more singing in the streets, but Arles is probably more sober than Avignon. Next week Bryan Ferry is coming to town (another festival, called Les Escales du Cargo).  I couldn’t work out the on-line rigmarole so we found the Cargo office, and bought paper tickets to Ferry’s show and also to see Angus and Julia Stone, from our part of the world, three nights later. The concerts are in the Antique Theatre which seats only 2500. All going well, and we are making small steps forward most days, we’ll have bought Enki by then. If that's so, we’ll take her cockpit cushions to put between our aged bottoms and the ancient stone terraces built by the Romans.

Enki in limbo

As a postscript, take a look at the beach nearest us, Plage Napoleon.  People drive here from miles away. It’s not quite Bondi, but there’s a lot of sand, and the sea is warm. It’s the backdrop which is so exotic – the gigantic seaport in the Gulf of Fos, which stretches around from Marseille.

Why there are no pictures

What we're hoping is that all the hard work in this boat purchase is at the front end. Don't laugh. We didn't choose the easiest of deals to sew up when we chose Enki ahead of the other boats on our short-list. A Swiss national sells a boat, with no EU tax paid on it, to a couple of Australians in French territory. The lawyers among you suck in their stomachs. We are optimistic, but we are holding our collective breath that after we've bought the boat we can leave her in Port Napoleon without a) having to sail her out of France immediately and re-import her or b) paying VAT. These are non-negotiable conditions of the sale, and though we've had positive verbal assurance from the customs agent whom Christophe engaged to put the boat in bond pending sale, we've insisted on a written confirmation of that advice before we complete the sale.  

Given that that happens, we then pay Christophe his money, and send off our application to Canberra to have the boat registered under an Australian flag. Only when we have Australian registration will we go with Christophe and the customs agent to see French customs proper and complete the legalities of the handover. This may all take some weeks. 

On the positive side of the ledger, a charming young Welshman drove here from Cannes on Friday and spent seven hours straight examining Enki in blistering heat.  He pronounced her a very fine vessel.  Her decks are in very good  nick (often a problem with the HRs, he told us), as is her hull. She's as solid as she looks, in other words.  He'll email us a 16 page report in two days, he said, but we have the guts of it. There are a couple of corroded sea cocks which need replacing ("it's a sinkability thing", he said) and there's a leak somewhere, either from the hot water or the generator, or both.  "Looks like the pressure relief valve on the hot water system, " says Alex. "And generator exhaust elbow."  Nothing drastic anyway, though much more contortion required from the man whose shoulders are still giving him grief (diagnosed "frozen shoulder", one of those frustrating time-will-heal conditions). 

Christophe drove back to Zurich early this morning with his rental van packed full of the remains of five and half years of living aboard - except for what he's left for us. We don't know exactly what that is because we still don't own Enki,  and we can't go aboard her yet. Amusingly, he has left us in charge of locking her up. When he arrived here three days ago, he was deeply embarrassed to find he'd forgotten the boat key.  He and Alex had to break into the boat. He's ordered a new lock from Sweden and Alex will install it when it arrives. 

So, we don't have any pictures yet. We've spent many hours on Enki these past couple of days, but it never once occurred to me to pull out the camera. It wouldn't have felt right to do that when we were sitting opposite Christophe, brokering the last sticky details of the contract. That part wasn't fun. That's when I wished there was a professional broker involved. There's a lot of fine print in these matters, and when you're drawing up a contract in two languages (German and English), there's a lot of scope for error too. 

We can see a chunk of Enki's bow, propped up on the hard stand, from the wide deck outside our second-floor apartment, and that's nice. She's in the section of this forest of masts labelled Paris on the yard plan. I suppose that's nice too. But then again, I'd be happy enough to have a boat in Oslo, or Rome, or Madrid. 

This is the state of play. We haven't opened the champagne yet. 

Travelling south (again)

It’s a long way from Zurich to Port Napoleon, at the mouth of the Rhone.  Not so much physically, and certainly not so for an Australian, but when we think “Europe” we tend to forget that old borders have historical and cultural meanings which can’t be erased by Brussels edict (ah, the mess the Greeks have made…could have told you so, the northerners say with rueful hindsight). The Swiss and the French share a border, so they’re kind of cousins, but there’s a fair bit of variation in the DNA.

The Swiss sit all bright and shiny and prosperous in their mountain-bound fiefdom, apart from the embarrassment of the Eurozone. I liked Zurich, as a town.  Who couldn’t? It’s just the right size, not too big, not too small, and so very shipshape, with a particularly pleasing combination of colour and shape, old and new.  I don’t think I’ve ever been in a place where the citizenry, and even the tourists, are as elegant and well-groomed. The guy below with the tattoo was part of a quiet little Hare Krishna event happening near the town hall on a Sunday. Even the orange people behave in Zurich.  

Zurich makes me understand afresh how bourgeois I am. I do love a clean pavement, a beautiful shop window display, a tasteful hotel room – in short, a sense of order and harmony in my surroundings. It’s the bane of my life, this bourgeois business. My only hope is to go to sea….

Or to France. Yes, the French are bourgeois at heart too, but they play with, and around with it, laugh at themselves – and they get ugly from time to time. France has beggars, graffiti, flakey paint, bad smells, bad guys. It’s also much cheaper to eat and drink in than Switzerland, thankfully.

We caught the train from Zurich to Avignon, and landed ourselves in a town ready to party hard. Proximity to the Avignon theatre festival, which runs from July 6 to 27, makes my heart lurch and pulse race – “it’s like you at a boat show,” I say to Alex. Look at all the posters. So many shows (about 1300, performed in every available space, public and private, I learn from a doll of a dressmaker called Robert).  Can’t we stay, pleeeeeze?

We’ve got a date in Port Napoleon though, so here we are. In the next few days we expect to learn a) the condition of Enki’s hull and decks from the surveyor – those are the most important aspects of the survey for Alex and b) what French customs expect of us if we buy the boat. A lot hangs on both these things.  Christophe is driving a rented truck from Zurich to meet us.  Whatever happens, he plans to empty out Enki of the possessions he’s lived with for the past five years. Even if we don’t buy her, she’s still for sale. His voyaging days are over.

Christoph and Jeanette at home

We’ve parked ourselves above the Capitainerie in an “appartement” which gives us space to spread ourselves out (bliss) and a basic kitchen.  We have fruit bowls on the bench. Last night, for the first time in a month, I cooked dinner and Alex did the wash-up. This morning I picked up fresh bread from the restaurant down below, and did a load of washing. We may be here for a few weeks, all going well. The alternative isn’t worth considering.

Happy birthday Alex

No cake, no candles, no schnitzel - but will a boat do?

He ponders the question...

Today, a summery Saturday in Zurich, we have shaken hands on the purchase of Enki, the HR48 hardtop which we saw in Port Napoleon at the beginning of our search. We've inspected an array of lovely boats at the both ends of the Mediterranean and in the UK over the past three weeks, but Enki is still the One, it seems.

She's where we left her in France, of course, but her owner, Christophe, is back at his drawing board in his hometown of Zurich. So here we are. There's a bit of tricky stuff to navigate before we can say definitively that she is ours, and the marine survey, we hope, will be the least of it. Buying an ex-VAT boat in France was never going to be our simplest option from a red-tape perspective, especially with 14 July and the big summer shutdown bearing down on us. But here we are, as I say. Nothing you can do about love.

Anything to give the man pleasure.

Happy birthday, Alex.

(actually, he did get a cake  - thanks Christophe and Jeanette)

PS if he missed out on the wrapped gift, I didn't. I've been looking in second hand bookshops for the third volume of Virginia Woolf's diaries for months now. It's out of print. Yes, I know, I could have found it on-line, but where's the fun in that? Yesterday, before we tackled Gatwick and Easy Jet again, we were in Lewes, a small town in Sussex near to where Virginia and Leonard Woolf spent their summers.  Lewes is deadset historic, but we didn't get to Anne of Cleves house. We went straight for the second-hand bookshops, and in the third one, called Bow Windows, there it was - a complete first edition set of the diaries.

 "It's only a winch handle," Alex said, as I squirmed at the price of the set.  No, it's three, or maybe four winch handles, actually. I don't really need to own books. Never have. I'm happy borrowing. But there they were, ripe for the plucking.

Anything to give the woman pleasure.

The Ouse river, near Lewes

Looking towards Rodmell from the Ouse river

Lewes honeypot

Getting the mix right

How could I have skipped Plymouth? Whatever else I think about England – and thinking about England exercises my mind a lot while I’m here – she is the history queen. She never lets you forget that.

So many famous and infamous boat people left England, or were sent from England, from Plymouth’s docks – explorers, convicts, settlers, merchants, adventurers.  Huge stone steps dropping down from the cobbled quay to the kelpy waterline trip a switch in my memory. I’ve read enough books, seen my share of BBC dramas. I know this place.  I can fill in the missing details – the tall ships, the chaos, the excitement and the excrement.  The characters are still here though. I don’t need to invent them.

Something was happening on the Plymouth waterfront last Saturday night. Perhaps it was just summer. A bit of warmth turns people’s heads here. Still I thought the people looked a bit exaggerated, a bit distorted, like characters out of Little Britain. The Old Guys Rule gang were in town in their leathers, and far too many girls were out walking, arm in arm, in very high heels. They were wearing sashes across their lurid short dresses. Later on, the night noises outside our hotel turned feral. I thought of Harry Brown – I mean Michael Caine’s character in the movie called Harry Brown – and then some more about England, and what she is, and has been. Perhaps there isn’t much difference between the two. Plymouth, I reckon, was probably never a very safe place after dark.

With a day up our sleeves, we took the long road to from Plymouth to Bristol, our leaping off place for flying in and out of Belfast in a day. Antony House is close to Plymouth as the crow flies, but across the Tamar River. That distance from Plymouth would suit me. In fact, Antony House would suit me. You can see why in the pictures below.

I’d have to have been better born to get a look in though. The same family, called Crew Pole, has lived in the place continuously for 600 years. That’s clever. Perhaps their daughters didn’t catch the king’s eye. Perhaps their sons kept clear of politics. Whatever, they hung onto a very beautiful piece of land, planted a garden of wonders and, in the 18^th century, built a new house which against the odds, still feels alive and lived in, because it is.

We’ve become far too familiar with the orange livery of the budget airline Easy Jet. No point complaining about the horrible schedules and no frills processing. That’s the deal. Low cost air travel along with wireless internet underpins this exhaustive (and exhausting) boat search.  

The boat we went to see in Northern Ireland held out so much promise. She was a late contender, but a strong one, we thought, with a hard-top and the layout I prefer i.e. a centerline bed and chairs in the saloon. She wasn’t easy to view, hanging as she was on a mooring on Strangford Loch. The broker begged to differ. Almost all her boats, she told us, were on moorings, and this one was relatively straightforward to access compared to most. Marinas, you understand, are not the norm in Ireland. Strangford Loch reminded me of New Zealand, where marinas are not the norm either.

Here’s where we picked up a tender to drive out to the boat. As usual, we spent a few hours aboard her. She was the last boat on our list.

That brings us back to The Stag, in Lyndhurst, where we’ve parked ourselves for the past two nights to chew over our options.  Yesterday, as well as watching Andy Murray beat a lack lustre Spaniard on centre court, we went to Bucklers Hard to top up the history levels – on the recommendation of my mother. Thanks mum. I have a soft spot for that grand old man of the sea, Francis Chichester, and Bucklers Hard, though I hadn’t recalled it, is where he kept his Gipsy Moth yachts for 30 years. There’s an elegantly carved memorial to Chichester in the tiny chapel in the village. The maritime history museum there has his cap and camera. Yes, I’m a Chichester groupie.

The main draw at Bucklers Hard is its 18^th century ship-building history. Many of Nelson’s war ships were built right in the village, on the Beaulieu River, by a shipwright called Henry Adams, and his lads. We had a good time there, and given that my temper is now horribly frayed, that was important. My stamina levels are well below what is needed for this kind of mission. I don’t like shopping of any kind, even boat shopping. If it were up to me, I’d have bought the first boat we both liked, and damn the expense.  Alex, on the other hand, is a trader through and through. He likes to weigh his choices. He likes to have choices. He might buy the first boat he saw, but not before he’s seen everything there is to see. He loves to check out the merchandise. I get bored very quickly by merchandise. When I get raw, he applies balm – wine and food are good, but history, applied in the correct manner, both soothes and stimulates a Termagant Wife (cf a certain Duchess of Malborough, whose portrait is labelled as such at Antony House).

Time out

Another day, another country, another boat...This has got to stop!

We're so shattered this evening after yet another big drive followed by several hours of intense boat inspection that we've turned on television to watch Wimbledon - in the right time zone, for a change. That great  Cypriot entertainer Baghdatis is giving an off-his-game Djokovic a big fright on centre court in the gentlemen's singles, and the crowd is loving him for it.  The lingering light outside is probably lovely, and we're only a hop, step and a jump from Plymouth's waterfront with its enormous maritime history. But it's line ball whether we'll leave the hotel room tonight.