Safely in France Attending to Tara



It must have been bright on the airplane.



The first week is gone … hard to believe that it is a holiday. Starting on Monday morning on a 07:30 flight to Toronto, Toronto to Frankfurt – sprint through the airport to catch the flight to Marseilles. Four of our five bags made it, so as you might expect, we’re the last people out of the airport – into the rental car and on to Port Napoleon. We stopped by the grocery store, marvelling at the low price of food and wine – reasonable wine is 5€ or about $6.50, produce is about 70% of what we pay in Canada, cheese about half of what we pay … hmmmmm, maybe the marketing boards are not necessarily there for the consumer as we charge a 300% tariff on cheese.



Hayden and Ross in their luxury beds.

We got to Port Napoleon and checked into the apartment – two bedrooms and a couple of couches so quite a nice place and then went and checked on Tara. There she was just as we’d left her, a little dirty but seemingly not too badly affected by a year on the hard. On closer inspection it was in the category of “not as good as we’d hoped, but not as bad as we had feared.” Of our five 48 pound bags, the majority of it was boat parts – a water pump, radar, depth sounder, satellite navigation, two helm station repeaters, a water pump, 100 feet of rope, 3 toilet pumps, pex crimper, grinder, drill, tool batteries, large inverter, wire, an bucket of electrical stuff, a new set of running lights, 30 feet of cooling hose, engine parts and a bunch more stuff that isn’t worth listing.

Waiting patiently...

I guess the good news is that a bunch of the gear came in pretty handy. Turns out the water pump and accumulator tank froze and split, so the new water pump was a really good idea. None of the toilets burst (thank goodness as we have 5 of them) so I replaced one pump in the forward cabin and now have two new spares. The new transponder installation went well – we drilled out an existing hole in the bottom of the boat and fit it in – thankfully after 48 hours in the water we have no leaks – so I guess we installed it correctly – that made bringing a pipe wrench from Vancouver worth it.

Basically on Tuesday the 26^th, we washed the boat and got it ready, with the real work starting on the 27^th. Well, after noon on the 27^th because we returned our 120€ a day Hertz car to the airport and rented a 30€ car locally – burning half a day in the process. We did marvel at the fuel economy of the Pugeot minivan we rented – 3 liters of fuel to go 180Kms. That would have been nearly 50 liters in Marina’s Dirtydog truck.

Nice mess...

Marina drove the kids to the beach while we got to work on the boat – a couple of other things ended up needing some service as well – the main halyard (rope that pulls up the mainsail) had frayed through and needed to be replaced. Thankfully there was a little bit left up top, we snagged it, started to pull it in and it parted – yikes, a lost halyard is a pain in the butt. Meanwhile, down below in the 100 degree cabin (remember that the water cools the inside of the boat and when we’re out of the water the 9000# keel is a bit of a heat sink – so it gets very hot inside the boat. I struggled with replacing the water system and got it done by the end of the day – only to find that the stern shower head had also froze and the faucet in the forward cabin was also toast. Once we got them straightened away the water pump stopped cycling every few minutes and we had reliable water.

Next we installed the new depth-sounder transponder through the hull – always a bit of a pucker factor when you drill a hole in the perfectly good bottom of your boat, but we sealed it up and it worked fine.

Then odd’s and sods, putting away all the gear, washing the boat, unpacking boxes, wondering why we bothered to bring any clothing; where are we going to put all these tools??? etc.

 Thursday morning at 10:30 they picked Tara up and put her in the water. Quick moment of truth and the boat started right away – good sign. We ran the motor for 20 minutes before moving the boat – also making sure the new through-hull wasn’t leaking, then we pulled into a slip – perfect mooring job BTW. Then we learned that we needed to move slips – and of course it’s blowing 25 knots on the beam – I backed into the slip OK, but then lost situational awareness when slowing down and the boat got a bit out of shape – nothing broken or damaged, but somewhat humbling at the same time.

Tara Being Moved

Short inset here from Marina...although Matt finds the boat prep details worth writing about, I favour the entertaining bits, like taking two 16 year old, brand new, "L" drivers out for some practice in our standard transmission rental car...better that than Matt's Beemer! Each stalled once and I won't bore you with details but it was pretty funny at times...the guys loved it! Ok...back to the awe inspiring boat prep....

We couldn’t really test some of the in-water systems -– for example the engine driven freezer -- until we were, well, in the water. Unfortunately our refrigeration was broken – fortunately there was a guy in the marina that fixes fridges – but how to get a hold of him. I tracked down his partner and he left him a note and Friday afternoon at 2pm he showed up and fixed the fridge. Turns out a defective O-ring let the refrigerant escape and once replaced and the Freon recharged, our fridge was cold again. Only thing left of the list was to get the mainsail halyard replaced and to hoist the sail.

From Left to Right: Matt, Hayden, Ross, Bob and Jessie

Marina left to pick up our nephew Bob – a medical student at Tulane University (I asked him how come he went to Tulane – couldn’t get into Four-lane?) How awesome is that … he’s tooling around the south of France for a couple of weeks on his last summer break before he goes into the Intern/Resident program and has to work like the rest of us – sucks to be him. Prior to medical school he spent three years as a French teacher in Boston and annually led a tour of the South of France with 30 high-school kids – and he took his mom with him a couple of times too … sounds like a load of fun.

The view from the top of the mast.

At dusk the wind dropped and we decided to try the main halyard. The broken main halyard turned out to be a fairly big challenge – we sent Ross up to the top of the mast and he was there for about a half hour unsuccessfully getting a messenger line setup. The next morning he got the messenger line through the two sheaves at the top of the mast – and voila we have a main halyard – but we can’t raise the mainsail because it is too windy. It’s Saturday morning and we’re itching to get going – bag getting the main up – let’s get out of Port Napoleon and head to an anchorage.