The last post

Sunday afternoon in Sydney. Claudia is just home from soccer ("so destroyed"), Freddy is at his dad's for lunch, Sam's along the road working a day shift in the bottle shop, Mike's downstairs playing guitar, Po (our cat) is on patrol on top of the garden wall, and Alex, well, he's sleep-walking in the weak winter sun. Jet lag. We're all present, all accounted for except for Enki II. She's the missing one. At least she's well polished on her topsides.

We left her four days ago in the care of the good people at Port Napoleon, with her papers in the best order possible. Perhaps I worry too much. I know I worry too much, actually. On our last day, waiting to hear from our customs agents,  I was as strung-out as I've ever been in my life.  I don't like loose ends, and I find myself panicked by the thick fogginess of  French bureaucratic buck-passing. The fog will lift. One day it will lift. You have to trust that it will lift, once you've done everything possible to establish your position. We have done everything possible.

So we said goodbye to Enki, dropped the rental car off at the Avignon TGV station and took the train to Paris, which  - as they say - we'll always have. We wandered, which is by far the best thing to do in Paris, anytime. In August, when lots of businesses pull down their shutters for the holiday season, Paris has a lovely idle tempo, like Sydney between Christmas and the middle of January.  For the poor sods who can't get away to the Riviera the city stumps up umbrellas and cushions on the banks of the Seine. People bake in the sun anywhere they can. The tan is the thing.

We ate in a small restaurant near the Bastille, and pretended that this was my 50th birthday celebration.  The waitress looked like Juliette Binoche, and sure enough, she was saving to study acting in New York.  My 50th birthday is long gone, but it's never too late to celebrate your 50th birthday in Paris. We did it well.

There's no reason to continue this blog that I can find, except for the pleasure of putting it together.  I'm going to deny myself that pleasure until we begin our travels on Enki II - hopefully at the start of the next European spring.  Probably I'll make a new website - seems logical. Between now and then, Alex plans to go back to Port Napoleon to supervise the work we've organised to be done on the boat - probably in November, after Dave and Pauline's wedding and before Christmas. By then, we'll have shipped across the boat gear we took off Kukka,- lines, anchors, tools, galley stuff, wet weather gear and so on - and he'll stow it aboard, ready for when we take off. We don't yet have a set plan, but we think we'll go east pretty quickly. Skip the crowded seaside towns of France and Italy, and head for Croatia, Greece, Turkey.  Who knows though. There's a lot to happen between now and then.

Until that time...

The season is nearly over

We're picnicking on Enki tonight. We and the fearful mozzies. The floorboards are rattling because Alex has been methodically taking them up to look what's underneath, but hasn't put the screws back in yet. It's hot tonight. The French are happy because summer should be hot. July, our friendly fruiterer told us, was a catastrophe. In Port Napoleon, boats are coming out of the water again.  There are a lot of transporter trucks appearing around the yard. The holidays are nearly over. Boats are on the move, overland.

This week has been stressful. Oh yeah, you say. A week in Provence is stressful. Tell me more. I'm not going to. Only to say that if you throw French customs into the proceedings, even in Provence you can wake at 4 am and lie awake thinking and worrying until light comes.

The main thing is that it seems to be sorted. Our Australian registration certificate arrived today, and with that we can go forward.

The week would have been less interesting without our new friends, the girls from Nausicaa. Here they are polishing her hull (below). Ori, the darker of the two, is the one in charge. She's Israeli, and I doubt there's any sailing job she'd not be up for. Her friend Ziffy, whose home address is a post office box in Antigua, is one of those girls you never forget. Perhaps we'll see them in Australia before the end of the year. We'd like that.

Like Ori and Ziffy, we've been polishing and buffing. This evening, before the sun set and before the mozzies discovered my tasty body, I shuffled around the deck on my bottom, rags and marine polish in hand, bringing a high (protective) shine to the above-deck duco. Alex is grateful - his body isn't made for shuffling. Since the sun set and moon rose over the Rhone we've been nibbling at pizza and dealing with
a bottle of rose. We bought the pizza slices in St Remy de Provence, after we'd had lunch in one of those mainstreet French brasseries which offer you a two-course lunch for 15 euros ( as you know, the euro doesn't pack the punch it used to). A morsel of steak, some apple pie. Eight hours later, you are still enjoying the meal. French food. There's good reason to take it seriously.

We went to St Remy because we were searching for a bricolage (a hardware store) to buy a polishing machine. We found three bricolages but no polishing machine (we think the French don't do DIY). Instead we bought a rug and some cutlery for Enki. Walking about St Remy reminded us of the first holiday we ever took together, in Provence, in 2002. Three weeks. That's all we could take back then. As we drove from St Remy back to Port St Louis, cross-country, we both recognised the stretch of road where we'd stopped so I could pick poppies.  We still have those poppies, dried between the covers of the Mariners Weather Handbook.

La Marseillaise

We call this progress.

If you enlarge the photo, you'll see that Enki is wearing her new name on the bow (Christoph's tarot emblem stays for the moment - I want to know more). Her name, port and official number are on the stern too, but I'm withholding that photo till we've re-done the letters, which are a tad crooked. The wind doesn't help when you're standing on a ladder with water, transfers and a blank canvas.

We've now received a copy of her Australian registration papers, scanned and emailed from Canberra, and that was enough to call Christoph back down to Port Napoleon.  We pick him up from the Arles station in a couple of hours. Tomorrow morning we all go to see the French customs agent who will, we understand, sign off Christoph and shepherd us through the French customs process. The less said the better at this stage. The champagne is still in the fridge. Perhaps we'll get to open it tomorrow night. Perhaps.

Alex is like a pig in shit. He has more mobility, and needs no encouragement to root around in lockers, lazarettes and of course, the engine room. Right now he's beaming. He's found the source of a leak identified by the marine surveyor in the generator. A hose clamp had rotted through; a fitting on the coolant reservoir was loose - "obviously sucking air and pissing out coolant". Imagine that!

Yesterday we ventured into a different kind of cavern, the Carrefour shopping centre at Port du Bouc, one of a string of huge seaports between here and Marseilles. We came out with a small espresso machine and pots, Tefal pots to be precise, the finest sort we could buy with detachable handles. Call that a strike for Tefal, which is a big sponsor of the French Film Festival in Sydney. We absorbed the Tefal message through our pores as we waited for the main feature, more times than we can bear to remember.

The new pots and frying pans stack brilliantly. I have a new pressure cooker too, the sort which (as the ad says) you can open and close with one hand. How did I ever live without it? Most of our galley equipment, plus ropes and anchors and lifejackets etc etc, will come in a box from Australia - that's the plan, anyway. But it was fun to get into the aisles and pick out a few appliances. Because Enki has a generator and, when Alex has finished with her, will have a large inverter, we'll be able to plug in a toaster or an espresso machine - or even an iron, for that matter - when the fancy takes us. This level of comfort comes with a bigger boat, but then again, we'll be slaves to the production of power even more than we ever were on Kukka.

On Friday, we had a play day in Marseilles. My treat. We arrived at about 11.30 am. The sky was cloudless, the heat and glare intense and the traffic grinding around the Vieux Port particularly clogged. Perhaps it always is, but I learned from the Saturday paper that at exactly that hour, a notorious gangster, known variously as The Cobra, Joel the Turk, and, more mysteriously M. Pierre, was shot three times, twice in the head and once in the neck as he sat down at his local cafe and opened up his computer. He died on the way to hospital. We must have heard the sirens. Surely.

The Vieux Port, Marseilles

Marseilles is a city with form. I love it. We need to run now - there's a Provencal jousting tournament we want to find in Port St Louis du Rhone before we pick up Christoph from the train station. So please make do with happy snaps. You've heard enough about our eating and shopping and passion for museums by now, I think.

La Tavola, 40 rue Sainte

Rue Paradis - and Eden Park

La Vieille Charite - site of the Museum of Mediterranean Archeology.

We come from a land downunder

Every so often it rains solidly. Today is Wednesday, market day, and solid rain is a complication. It’s a complication for the stallholders, but it’s a particular complication for me because, for the first time since Christophe went back to Zurich about two weeks ago, we have people coming to dinner.  I had thought “fresh tuna, with some young potatoes, green beans, a salad, a few cheeses, then strawberries and raspberries, perhaps melon too….”

The apartment is light on kitchen equipment. We can muster four plates and wine glasses and cutlery. However most importantly for our guests, two young women who are living on a 39 foot boat in the yard, we can offer space.  Ori is one of the professionals I spoke about. She’s been hired to fix up and then race the boat in question, a Swan (nice). The boat is in bad shape after a winter of neglect,  however, and she’s doubtful if the owner will get more than a month of racing out of her this season.  Apparently he’s already talking of buying a bigger Swan, a 60 footer.  That sort of appetite keeps the marine industry down here busy.

Ori helped us with a contact for the all-important marking board which you need to fix to your boat for the purposes of Australian registration. The registration process is what’s keeping us here in France. It’s long-winded, and even more so because Australia is far away and in a different time zone.  We have a helpful registrar in Canberra, and all modern  communications  systems at our disposal – couriers, email and fax -  but still, we are talking weeks, not days to complete the purchase of Enki. The law demands original documents, signed and witnessed. When the boat is registered under her new flag, we front up to the French customs, as the new owners, and – well, that’s where we hope our expectations prove correct, so to speak. When she’s  been re-imported into the EU under our names, we can go home.  No-one said it was going to be easy, did they?

Alex’s crummy back has been keeping us battened down more tightly that we (I) would like, but we drove again to Arles on Sunday night to hear Angus and Julia Stone play before a packed house and then to Avignon on Monday to extend the rental on our car. Angus (On-goose, as his name sounds in French) and Julia didn’t need any support from us or any other Australian cheer squad (those who weren’t in Paris that day to watch the triumph of Kadel Evans in the Tour de France, that is ). The Stone kids are HUGE in France. I don’t get it, really. They’re young and their voices are tender and bruised. Their music is, I suppose, like a cool shower to wash away dry dusty French pop which gets into everything here. But why does one band succeed and another not? Good luck to On-goose et  Julia.

Avignon was bursting with players. I drank up the energy, and the urbanity of the place. Another time, I told myself….Alex took pictures in black and white because that’s where his head was. For me, the festival was all about colour. I have it in my head still (the bra and panties set was red, by the way). 

A place for romance

I've been told several times by people I love that it's time for the photo of the two of us which has introduced this blog since its beginning to go. I'm very fond of that photo, but they're right. So it's gone. So too has Kukka's bio on the side of the blog. We will make the transition slowly from one boat to the other, but this is a start. There will be more romantic photos (beware).

Beats the Entertainment Centre 

Speaking of which, we got to the Bryan Ferry concert in Arles the other night. Before the show we ate in a deeply shaded courtyard restaurant, and struck up a conversation with a young Swiss couple at the next table on the basis of a bottle of red (ours) and a baby (theirs).  They were curious about Bryan Ferry - recognised the name, but couldn't quite place the music. I would have been the same if he hadn't recorded an album of Bob Dylan's music a couple of years ago. We've played it over and over. He has a voice I don't seem to tire of,  and it was for that we went to Arles, not so much a hit of Roxy Music nostalgia. That and the Roman amphitheatre.

Spending money pleasurably

Enki's cockpit, with the all-important hard top

I'd forgotten we had taken photos of Enki back in June when we first saw her. She was still in the water then. But now's perhaps a better time to show her off.  We made full payment for Enki yesterday.  The reality of that hasn’t yet sunk in. The euros have gone from our bank account, the registration papers are on their way to Canberra, but that’s not what I’m talking about.  Enki will feel like our boat only after a certain period of time has passed. 

Aft cabin - there's also a single bed on the port side, on the other side of the chair

Forward cabin

Nav station and saloon bench seat  

A boat, liked a house, changes hands at its own pace, which is quite separate from the legal machinery involved. The spirit of the previous owner stays around in the myriad of decisions he or she has made about what should and shouldn’t be on the boat. On Kukka, we were very aware of Mr Tada (her original owner) during our first season aboard. During our second cruising season, he retreated. We’d made her ours.

Christoph shows me the stove - is it big enough for the bread pot?

Christoph, who built Enki and lived aboard her for five years, is a minimalist. He wears sober colours and he doesn’t chatter.  He’s an architect, a Swiss architect.  Enki is sober too., verging on stern.  What we like very much about her, among many other things, is that she isn’t over-accessorized.  She is strong on essentials, light on bling.  Her extras, for instance, include well- thought-out partitioning inside drawers and around the galley, and an enviable stack of vegetable baskets built into the hanging locker of the passage cabin. She has no television or airconditioning. That we found to be the exception rather than the rule. TV isn’t our thing, more than ever so at sea, and airconditioning ducts take up a lot of space which would otherwise be available for storage.  Christoph also did without a bowthruster. That’s unusual these days on a boat her size.  We part company from him on that point.

There’s a bit more waiting to do. The registration papers have to cross the world and come back again, completed, and then we will accompany Christoph on a visit to French customs. He’ll sign Enki out and we’ll her sign in. While we wait, we’ll begin to absorb our new ownership.

We will also continue to eat well. Some of you will be surprised that up till now I have posted so few pictures of food and/or markets. Well, here they are.

The weekly Port St Louis du Rhone market happens on a Wednesday morning when the main street is blocked off.  The stalls are a mix of what the British call tat (cheap clothing, trinkets, the kind of stuff which in the old days used to be sold by tinkers) and fresh produce. We are just two, so I’m holding back most of the time. One slice of tomme de brebis, or hard sheep’s cheese this week (last week I bought a soft sheep’s cheese and a mid-ripe goat’s cheese). A whole slice from the belly of a tuna. Yellow peaches, apricots, strawberries, small green plums (Claude Reine), massive tomatoes, courgettes shaped like plump pears, eggplant, salted almonds….We still have not finished the sausage from last week, made from half pork, half bull (taureau). It’s strong. We passed on the donkey sausage (true).

Port St Louis is a working town. Its market is not for tourists.  There are no panama hats or olive oil soaps or Opinel knives or bunches of lavender. But there is street theatre in the summer. Yesterday, three men dressed in suits were being led on leashes by a woman.  They were billed to appear again last night at the port. But we stayed home last night, cooked our tuna, and nursed Alex’s back. Tonight we’re going to hear Bryan Ferry at the Roman theatre in Arles. He’s got to be concert fit!

Doing the hard yards

In the evenings here at Port Napoleon, we often take a turn around the yard. At first I was nervous about walking near the cradles. It felt dangerous, like walking under a ladder or standing too close to a big piece of machinery. But I’ve grown to like being around the keels, near the rough under- bellies of boats.  

Alex gets his strength back

The first time were here, when we got our first look at Enki in the second week of June, Port Napoleon was like a cemetery with so many “dead” boats packed tight up against each other, and barely a living soul in sight. Now, with summer in full swing, the place is buzzing with “professionals” (the young men who turn old men’s dreams into reality) and with owners and their families who arrive every day to prepare their boats for the water. Mostly they are French, but there are plenty of people from further north – Germany, England, Norway, Belgium and so on.  We usually have a beer in early evening at the Jospehine, the bar/restaurant down below (we take the laptop with us, as everyone does, because the wireless signal is faster there). We now recognize the professionals and the marina staff,  but other faces change almost daily.  Families open up their boats, clean them, anti-foul them (if they’re not already done) and then they’re gone, in the water, off on their summer holiday.

Professionals at work

Boat arrives from Amsterdam by truck

New mast waiting for installation

Because the evenings are so long and warm, we take it slowly, walking right around the perimeter of the yard and then up and down a few pontoons.  There are some big new masts going in, new sails being hoisted. We passed a rigger last night working on one of those ‘wow’ boats, the sort which smells like a new car.  Then there are the hulks, the old timers, and of course, the super-sleek racehorses which are just panting for a run. There are comparatively few “serious” cruising boats here, of the sort we saw in the Pacific, decked out with wind generators and solar panels. Mostly what we see are European production cruisers set up for Mediterranean sailing.  Who needs a hard top when the sea is smooth and winds fair?

Brand new Jeanneau 54 deck saloon 

Alex’s back has been playing up lately, but Port Napoleon is completely flat with plenty of sights to take his mind off the pain – the perfect backyard, in fact. Throughout the day we can see boats being moved around the yard, and on our walk we notice where they’ve gone from. Big holes are appearing, as if teeth have been removed, in the rows of hard stands. Lots of boats have cars parked next to the keel, under the hull, and ladders going up to the deck. Owners stay on their boats while they are preparing them, sleeping on board and climbing down to use the toilet and shower block, and to eat and drink at the Josephine. Not my cup of tea. From our deck we see a 60-something man who seems to be living permanently on his huge motor cruiser (the boat’s for sale).  The caravan or campervan tucked in between the hardware is a smarter idea, I reckon.

If you don’t rent an apartment, as we are doing, or a “bungalow” (a room in a converted container), there aren’t too many other options.  Port Napoleon is out on a limb. When five French military heliopters flew over this morning (coming back from Libya?) they wouldn’t have woken much of a neighbourhood. Across the Rhone to the west (pictured below at Port St Louis) there's the wilderness of the Camargue, and east there's the wilderness of the gigantic Gulf of Fos and Marseille seaport. 

From our room with a view

What’s surprising is not how much activity there is around the yard, but how many boats are still on their cradles. It’s the second half of July already! The summer is half gone. I hope we’re not still here in August, but I’m curious to know how many boats don’t get in the water at all over summer. My feeling is that it must be a lot. There are large sections of the yard which still feel like a graveyard, where there are no cars, and no ladders. There are a lot of boats for sale, some of them pretty, like this boat below, which is registered in Port Vila, Vanuatu (what is its story?), but many of them have no particular attraction, as far as I can see. Who buys ordinary old boats? Why would you pick this one, say, over that one in a line-up? I should know by now, having spent a month examining boats, but none of the boats we looked at was ordinary, as such. Or that’s my opinion.

Tania, out of Port Vila FOR SALE

We walk past Enki every night, and are anxious to make her our boat. But we are waiting for documentation from Zurich. It’s in the post., Christoph has informed us.  We are crossing our fingers it arrives in good order by mid-week.  The anxiety of a private sale is not something I’d go through again, by choice.  So while it may seem monotonous, and  a bit odd-ball to be walking around the boatyard each evening, it’s also soothing. We are among boats, we can see the boat we intend to buy.  If we could be in the water, it would be even better, but for now we’ll be happy if can just complete the sale, and be aboard Enki,  Start getting to know her.