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.

Missing a beat

I've been missing music, terribly. Alex brought an iPod with him, but I'm not an iPod person. I've tried, but I want music to come towards me in waves, not bore directly into my brain.  In Sydney, where invasive commercial music is like a weed infestation in the city's public and private spaces, I find myself more and more choosing not to listen to background music. I treasure the silence of home.  But at Port Napoleon, where we have no musical options at all bar French television and the high-pitched noise of the wind, I find myself longing for sweet sounds, rich sounds, moody and upbeat sounds.

Quiet as a library in our apartment 

Yesterday was a good day for music. We drove across the Camargue to St Maries de la Mer in search of bulls and horses and we found both - not in action in the ring or on the streets, as I'd hoped, but close enough and very much in the flesh. Here they are.

Poster for the weekend's sport

But as bonus we walked into a square behind the town's austere stone church and found Spanish flamenco musicians and a dancer were performing for the patrons of restaurants and lunch places.  I was entranced. She wasn't a classical Spanish beauty, but her arms moved like fish through water, and Spanish song is unlike any other. It breaks into your heart as easily and quickly in a crowd of midday tourists as under a moon at midnight.

From St Maries, we drove back across the marshy plains towards home, and stopped in at the Chateau d'Avignon. Again we got lucky, arriving at the state-owned former hunting lodge (below) in good time for a concert of traditional Languedoc hillbilly music, brought to us courtesy of Les Suds festival in Arles which I mentioned in the previous post.

The musicians, from a place called Black Mountain about 30 km north of Carcassonne, were  playing the bodega, a bizarre-looking piped instrument with the bag made out of the hide of goat, legs and all. It sounds very like the bagpipes, but more sonorous - a deeper, more mysterious pipe. The leader of the band, Sophie Jacques, held her bag in front of her, like a baby in a sling, while the boys each tucked their goat under one arm.

The music was for mostly made dancing, like Irish jigs. We were sitting outdoors, under large plane trees, behind the chateau which in the late 19th century had been ostentiously renovated by a very wealthy Marseille wine merchant called Noilly Prat. A couple of women kicked up their heels at the back of the crowd, Sophie (credited with rescuing the bodega from obscurity) told legends of the Black Mountain, Alex focused on the lovely eyebrows of the woman behind the camera, drums and brass and concertina added a touch of the Marseille waterfront and we all clapped and tapped our feet.

Inside the Chateau d'Avignon was one of the most wonderous and whimsical art exhibitions I've ever seen - mostly sculpture which riffed on the theme of humans and animals (think hunting lodge). If I could have whisked my sculptor daughter across the world on a magic carpet to enjoy its ingenuity with me I would have, because there's no other way for her to see these fabulous creations but to be here. There's no catalogue (yet), and Alex was nabbed for taking pictures, and forced to delete them under the don't-mess-with-me eye of chateau security. Perhaps you can make out an intricate paper cut-out of a dress stuck to the first floor window above where the concert was taking place in the the chateau's shaded but still glowing northern side. That's just a whisper of what's inside.

Last Sunday, before the mistral blew in and when the late evenings were still and warm and the mosquitoes rife, we took ourselves off to another outdoor concert, this time in our nearest town, Port St Louis du Rhone (sample architecture below). A European youth orchestra, with a Belgian conductor, took on the bugs and the local petrol heads to play a programme of Beethoven's 5th piano concerto (with a perfunctory Florentine soloist who wiped the keyboard and his head periodically for sweat or bugs, or both), a short Mendelssohn overture and a robust Rimski-Korsakov piece, supposedly Spanish in flavour, but definitely an anti-dote to the Germans. We forgot to bring the camera, which is a pity because le tout Port St Louis was out that night, with local pollies kissing and hand-shaking row by row - bypassing us, the obvious strangers.

Then there were the Indians. They played Port St Louis on the eve of 14 July, a huge night in any French town.  I don't know what you'd call their style - breezy brassy jazz mixed with carnival, possibly. It was jolly, and loud, and it went down well with the mussels and frites brigade, the beer, the aperifs and the barbecued fish. How the Jaipur Jazz band came to be invited to this scruffy seaport, marine industry and fishing town is anyone's guess. But the cultural programmers in Provence are a busy and imaginative lot. If we can find this much live music with so little effort in a week in a region which is far from fashionable, then bravo them. All of it was free too.

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.