A perfect shade of blue

Today we knew we'd arrived on the Cote d'Azur -  arrived, as in "look, that's our yacht anchored over there" (Enki is out of the frame, a bit to the right of those big mothers). Do I look sufficiently nonchalant? I'm not. I'm squeezing the pleasure out of each sunlit minute.

The company that we're keeping in Antibes is not what we're used to, which doesn't mean we couldn't get used to it, at a pinch. 

Actually, we're anchored at Anse de la Salis, around the corner from the town marina where the superyachts are lined up.  From Sunday afternoon until this morning, aside from one very wet foray in the dinghy, we stayed put on Enki, watching the barometer drop and the south-westerly wind gather speed and menace.

The only sailors brave enough to be out  on Sunday and Monday were a bunch of children in their Optimists - I'm fairly sure we must have been watching a training camp for France's finest juniors.

Last night, the bad weather finally moved on and we woke today to the stuff of your dreams - ours too. So, instead of pulling up anchor and heading across to Corsica, as we'd been planning to do, we decided to loiter in Antibes and check out the Picasso museum. It's got the best views in town, including this one of Enki at anchor (she's second from the left). 

Picasso spent only a few months working in Antibes in 1946, at the beginning of his Francoise Gilot period. He worked from a studio on the top floor of the former Grimaldi palace, and on the strength of that brief association, the town has converted the building into a(nother) Picasso museum.

Miro at the Picasso museum

Picasso produced so much that inevitably not everything of his that's hung in awe is going to stop you in your tracks. What did it for me was a wall of chunky glazed plates, a group of sweet and crazy ceramic vesesls and a sublime painting called Joie de Vivre. But nothing in the collection, to my mind, surpasses the austere beauty of the 14th century building with its commanding position, peering down through seven centuries on the loveliness below.

 

The plan is to leave Antibes tomorrow morning, and sail overnight to either the east coast of Corsica or Elba, off the coast of Italy, depending on what's happening out there. The weather - ah, the weather. I'd like to say we're starting to understand it, but that would be quite untrue. We don't have a clue, yet. Give us time, lots of time.

Dinner in St Tropez

Alex finally got to play with his new toy yesterday. Here's Enki on her way to St Tropez, her sails reefed, trucking along at about 7 knots, often more, in a fresh south-westerly breeze. Her skipper couldn't sit still. So much to figure out. Everything to enjoy. Like Alex, Melinda has dreamed of sailing in the Med since  - well, since forever. She probably didn't expect to be wearing wet weather gear on her first day under canvas on the wine-dark sea. More like a pair of crisp white shorts and a cheeky little striped top. Ah well, that'll come. Yesterday she, like the rest of us, was ecstatic to be riding the swell.

The day began a little shakily. Alex had made driving into the pontoon stern-to look so easy the previous evening, but driving out frontwards in the morning against a fresh cross-breeze was another matter. Let's just say that ropes got where they shouldn't have got, and there was some concern about the prop. No need, as it turned out, but Alex motored out of Toulon harbour looking grimmer than the the prospect of a fine day's sailing called for.

Enki galloped the 55 miles from Toulon to St Tropez like the proven distance runner she is. She's a big boat, however, and all those extra electric aids (winches, the in-mast furler) are going to make sailing her so much more manageable. More on this later, from the skipper. Enough to say, on her first day out she behaved impeccably.

We'd imagined that Saturday night would be busy in this part of the world, but the Baie des Canoubiers, tucked around the corner from where the big boys tie up in the old port of St Tropez proper, was so empty when we arrived we could have been on the Queensland coast.

Dave dived on the prop (it hadn't folded back in, as it is meant to do), and quite apart from the joy of discovering a chewed-up plastic bag tangled around the mechanism, he splashed around like a puppy on his first Med dip. So many firsts. First splash in the Med for our new Rocna anchor too - it bit strong and hard into the weedy bottom.

It's not too hard, really. We might get used to this. The food on board is not bad either. 

Black and blue

Above me, on deck, the sails are going up.  All afternoon they have been walking on my cabin roof, turning our boat into a sailing vessel. Alex, Markus, Melinda, Dave. I listen but am apart, told to keep my body horizontal. Frozen peas are also involved.  If my ears don't deceive me, Silvain may have finished, or be close to finishing installing our davits. Halyards, outhauls, battens, furlers, sheets, electric winches - everything I been dying to get my hands on for weeks has been on offer today for the able-bodied to help set up. The weather is made to order - a light breeze, blue skies, the antithesis of last weekend's nastiness.  We've been talking of leaving by Tuesday. There's enough basic food and wine etc stowed aboard Enki to see us through to Croatia - a month from now, or thereabouts. Melinda and I have shopped and shopped these past three days. We returned the rental car to Arles last night.

I know that we are still on the pontoon, and no-one is thinking of going anywhere else tonight or even tomorrow. What I don't know is why I can't stay on my feet after so many years of living on them. Here I am, again nursing a painful injury after slipping on a (wet) non-slip surface wearing non-slip shoes. This time it's my left hand which is out of action. If I can be useful for anything in a week or two I'll consider myself lucky.

Roman arena in Arles

After many months, I finished reading The Illiad this afternoon. Those Greek gods sure played havoc in people's lives, as Homer wrote of them. I'm open to the thought that a capricious Olympian is taking me down a peg or two. Either that or...I don't want to think more. We are so close now. Melinda and Dave will be wondering what they have signed up for. Fortunately I took them to Arles on Thursday - mostly for pleasure, with just a small diversion for boat business.  I'm so fond of that town, and they understood why by the end of the day.

Parfumerie, not chandlery

Sea blue shutters - I want them!

One step at a time

How about some good news for a change? Here's Enki with her mast in, boom attached too. She's a yacht!

The riggers haven't yet finished tightening everything up. They worked all Saturday in the southerly gale which came in about 30 minutes after the rig was stepped.  And yes, Murphy stuck his foot in again - the turnbuckle at the bottom of the backstay couldn't be attached because the threads on both ends were identical (instead of opposing). Marcus claims his English isn't good (it is), but I read him loud and clear  - "oh, for fuck's sake" - when this little gem turned up. Nothing that a piece of rope can't fix, temporarily.

The rig went in on Saturday because we got lucky on Friday. There's a classy rigging outfit called Navtec on the outskirts of Cannes. Cannes is a super-yacht mecca, and in such a crowd, Enki's vital statistics don't raise an eyebrow. Not only did Navtec have a swaging machine which could handle our 14 mm stainless stell rigging, but on a Friday between a public holiday and the weekend, someone there agreed to operate the machine. Oh la la. What's a 240 km drive in such circumstances? We squeezed the heavy coiled stays into our tiny car's boot, and hurtled east. 

We managed only a sideways glimpse of the big toys on the Cannes waterfront. Their celebrity owners were in town for the film festival  but for us the main feature was the spectacle of Navtec's man Alexandre efficiently measuring out, cutting and swaging our pesky shrouds. A thing of beauty. Funny how your dreams shrink to fit the size of your ambitions. Our ambition is to leave Port Napoleon on a yacht.

Yacht stranded on Plage Napoleon

Sylvain at work on the davit supports

Yesterday the low intensified over us. At Plage Napoleon, an achingly barren stretch of grey sand at the end of our road, a yacht under sail had been blown onto the lee shore by weather much grimmer and uglier than any I'd imagined seeing in the Med. The driving rain and wind eventually chased away Silvain, our friendly man at the stern, who is making solid progress in attaching the davits to hold our dinghy. 

I don't believe I've mentioned the dinghy yet. Like Enki, she (as yet un-named) is over-sized. That wasn't our intention. Alex and I are well aware of our physical limitations. But for very French reasons - i.e. we took what we could get our hands on at the time - we've bought a 3.1 meter Zodiac RIB. It's flash. Hard bottom, a locker - but man, is it heavy. 87 kg. No way we can lift that without mechanical aids. Without Sylvain, we're floundering. 

Talking about floundering, there was small incident on Friday as we were leaving the boat, revved for Cannes. I fell in the water, fully clothed (obviously). There are no pictures, and the memories of those present will fade, as will the brutal bruise which has spread around my left thigh. My ego will recover too. Perhaps I'll learn - again - that you don't walk frontwards down steps on a boat (in this case, on the stern) with both hands full. Ouch, and ouch again.

I wouldn't want to be messing up my footwork at a glitzy Cote d'Azur resort like Port Frejus. We stopped by Frejus on the way back from Cannes, and unanimously agreed that nothing would drag us into such a claustrophic, artificial harbour. That was before we saw a yacht driven ashore by a vicious southerly gale though.

Port Frejus

Breakfast on the pontoon

This is what we see from Enki's stern deck. Still a marina, but not bad, eh? My expectations have been modified after a couple of weeks at Port Napoleon, but I rate our new view of the travel lift as a considerable improvement on our old view of the rump of the sprawling port of Fos-Marseilles. I tried to get a white Camargue horse in the foreground, but hey, who's pretending it's anything but agricultural out there. 

Last night was our first night sleeping aboard Enki. We got the mattresses out of the upholstery loft and into the aft cabin by mid-afternoon. First we moved enough clothing to fit out a small Pacific nation (why did I do it? why didn't I leave it all at home?) into her forgiving lockers. There were a few hiccups last night, but our bed was comfortable and,  as of this afternoon, Alex fixed the toilets, and we have hot water. 

Yesterday morning, feeling flighty, we drove out of the boatyard and beyond Port Saint Louis for the first time in two weeks. As we crossed the marshy land between the Rhone and Fos, I suddenly saw them - the flamingos. It was my first time.  I'm sorry we couldn't get better shot, but there are few places to stop on that road.  I promise you, even in this flat mid-morning light they were worth pulling over for, such delicate creatures with a naughty flash of deep pink of the underside of their wings. 

I had tracked down the perfect kayak (my choice is a Hobie Lanai kayak, weighing 17 kg) at Martigues. Martigues styles itself as a little Venice. It has watery light and a few canals, a couple of them linked by quaint old bridges, but other than that you're scratching to find much else the two towns have in common. 

After we'd clinched the kayak deal at Marcon Yachting, which is under the very un-Venetian bridge above, we did a bit of telecommunications, buying top-ups for the phone and iPad at an SFR shop because the SFR website says non to foreign credit cards. Then we wandered the lanes. A treat! 

Today the French are voting for a new president and it's quiet in the boatyard, not because of the election but because it's Sunday, and on Tuesday, which is May 8, the anniversary of the German surrender to the Allies in 1945, there's another public holiday. The following week, the public holiday falls on Thursday. Even the French despair of getting any work done in May. Everyone is too relaxed, says Silvain, who doesn't have a leg to stand on in the "too relaxed" department, having spent eight months making two stainless shoes for our davits. Oh, I say, and why would that be?  It's the holiday season, he says, as if it were the most obvious thing in the universe that in the Mediterranean the summer season has already begun. Ah, that's it.  

The due date

It came to me this morning. This feels like the last week of pregnancy when a) everything seems to go into slow motion and b) you start to wonder why you haven't been scared before. There's no going back. The birth/launch of Enki is scheduled for next Thursday, May 3, at 10 am, and if there are whitecaps on the Rhone,  as there are today, we'll deal with those too.

The supermarket was selling potted lily-of-the-valley plants today. I missed the clue. Tuesday is May 1 which makes this a four-day weekend (the public holiday came as news to me over the loudspeaker as I cruised the aisles - the supermarket will be closed on Tuesday). That means the batteries won't be here until Wednesday. The French call it "making the bridge" - taking Monday off. Everyone will do it, or try to.

There's a southeasterly wind howling through the yard now, so we've lost the polar chill.  Families have begun arriving in station wagons with northern European number plates, luggage pressed up hard against all rear windows. Flashy Italian and German sports cars are appearing in the car park too, with a different kind of driver.

There are some very big and expensive boats here. I washed down Enki's mast this afternoon with a superyacht from Cowes looming over me. She's been in the shed for 18 months, Marcus tells me, while her three owners squabble over the cost of fixing her up. The quotes have come in at between $800,000 and a million dollars. Or was that euros? Either way, she's a rich man's obsession.

All boats are obsessions, really, even when they're as small as this little blue thing, tucked in between "serious" cruising yachts.  She's something like 22 feet long. Her owner lives aboard her year round, in the yard (there was a light snowfall this year in Port Napoleon). Brian's a little guy, useful for crawling into tight spaces, who works for the shipwrights in the green shed next to the boat. He loves boats, but he doesn't seem too fussed about whether or not they're in the water.

There are quite a few people like that at Port Napoleon. That's why getting the boat launched needs to be our obsession.

Dragging the chain

Who's in a hurry to go sailing? Not me. Too cold for a Sydney softie. A demented icy-fingered wind has been raging through the boatyard since our arrival, making a mockery of sporting intentions. In town this morning for the weekly market, I spotted hands of wisteria falling over a wall, about to burst into flower. At home, the wisteria comes out around the time of Freddy's birthday in mid-September. Season for season, that makes it still early to be out on the water, I figured, conveniently forgetting the plan is to live on the boat year round.

A new Rocna anchor was delivered yesterday - 40 kg of galvanised steel for us to throw onto the ocean floor.  That should hold.  The anchor is a big ticket item. I struggle to think of the small ones. We've  made a decision on the dinghy and life raft. Batteries are next. At the start of the season, it's as much about availability as price. "Life's a game," Alex says, hanging up on Frank in Antibes. In November Frank was competitive on battery price; now he's not. Alex is a born trader, energised by commerce.

French customs on the other hand are reliably deadening. Four boxes of our personal effects and spare parts are stopped in their tracks in Marseilles.  A familiar story. By rights it should have a happy ending, but there's so often a twist in the tail with les douanes.

In the yard, Alex is snapping at heels, and commitments are being made. The ubiquitous Berry family starts work again tomorrow on Enki's mechanical and other moving parts, and Paul the electrician promises he'll be on the boat this weekend (he's a refugee from Queensland). We've booked Enki in for anti-fouling - yes, someone else is going to paint her bottom. Alex's decision. Call it spinal maintenance.

Markus the rigger is ready to go too. Tomorrow we'll clean up the mast which has been in the shed all winter. We're treating Enki to new standing rigging i.e. all the stuff that holds up her mast. She's been around the world once on the existing rig. It may be good enough to go the distance again, but then again, it may not. We're playing it safe. House policy.

Today, as I mentioned, was market day in Port Saint Louis du Rhone. There's nothing not to like about fresh produce in France, but it does pay to be awake when you are buying. We were at the market early, before many of the stallholders had finished setting up. The fishmonger was not yet ready for customers so I went around to the butcher's van and bought two steaks for dinner, the best he had. The meat looked a little different from what I'm used to, but often food does in France, and usually it tastes better too. Only after he'd cut and wrapped my meat did I glance up at the sign behind him. Even if I couldn't read French, my stomach would have somersaulted. I'd clearly bought meat from a horse butcher. 

I can't eat horse meat. I don't know why. It's irrational. I eat pig, and pigs are intelligent animals. I'm not especially an especially squeamish carnivore. I love calf's liver. I've eaten sheep brains (standard fare in my New Zealand childhood). I like tongue - I ordered it recently at a tapas bar in Sydney, and the taste brought back good memories of my mother's tongue press. But horse...how do they grow horses for slaughter anyway? Like cows and sheep and goats? Or do they kill their working animals, like laying hens which are passed their best? I can't imagine it, but then again, there's a lot I can't imagine, which is why it's a good thing for homebodies like me to travel often and for long periods. I'm not sure I need to eat horsemeat to broaden my mind but buying it got me thinking. I went back to the fishmonger. 

Sydney to Burgundy

On the road with 60 kg of luggage

I know I’m somewhere else as soon as I wake. The birdsong in France is sweeter, higher-pitched, more excitable than the sonorous warbling of magpies which wakes me in Sydney. But then again, it is spring on this side of the world, the season of wickedly sudden cloudbursts, fat buds and long evenings. The birds have reason to be excited. We do too.

Yonne's left bank

We navigated around Paris, bypassing its famous spring, and headed south, stopping for the night in Joigny, a small town on the river Yonne, because…..I remembered. This happens when you get older. One week in spring, half a lifetime ago, my parents rented a canal boat to float down the river from Joigny to Auxerre. Nigel and I were young and footloose in Europe, and we joined them. Before the river flooded and we had to abandon the Claude Tillier (such a grand name for a hulk) we had such whale of a time.

April in Joigny

Curiously though, my most lasting memory is of chasing a cat on my bike along the tow path. The cat was terrified, something I was oblivious to in my fiendish state. I remember how ashamed I was when a lock keeper shouted at me, and I came to my senses. The Claude Tillier was a memorably ugly ship. I looked for her on the pontoons near our hotel, The Rive Gauche, but canal boats have changed shape. There were no ugly ones.

Schnitzel anticipation

He learned this from his dad (Dave and Pauline)

To regress, we left Sydney in a deluge of autumn rain (and did I mention tears?). The days before however were as fine as you could hope for. Dave brought us all (the extended tribe) together for a schnitzel feast, which unbelievably we were able to eat outdoors. If nothing else, Alex has passed on to the next generation the schnitzel-making gene.

Sam graduated from Macquarie University with a law degree. My son the lawyer. Ah, mothers. It was his moment, but what pleasure to share it.

Madi and Sam, and Sam's mum

Many text messages, but from Pops, the one which carried me through: “You are starting your adventure, and don’t get caught up in the leaving side if you can….” That girl. She’s lucky she escaped being press ganged.