Thursday 1st April - Sunday 4th April 2004 Dock at Peronnes.

Thursday 1st April 2004 Dock at Peronnes.

Warmer 7.7° C. Grey with light, short showers of rain. It was raining when we got up at dawn. Tidied up and slung all the inflammable stuff out of the gas locker and engine room, plus the petrol generator, stowing them under the little tjalk behind us. M. Lemaire arrived on time at 8.00 a.m. Mike went to find him. A very modest, unassuming kind of a chap. He spoke very good English and told us he’d worked in a Wimpy bar in Blackpool during his teens in the sixties and he’d seen the Beatles perform live there. To assist him, Mike ground off small patches of paint where our expert had put chalk X’s and then he checked the thickness of the boat’s hull, using a little Baugh & Weedon ultrasonic thickness test meter (We used to use equipment made  by them in a former life). He did the same on Rosy, then came on board our boat to write up his notes and I made him a cup of tea while he had a look at our previous surveys. He didn’t want to look at anything else, he went to write up his notes on Rosy sitting in Bill’s back cabin. 

He was quite embarrassed about the article his friend David Blagrove had written about him in the March edition of “Waterways World” He’d asked if we’d contacted him after reading that. We said no, he’d been recommended to us by Helen who owns Floan. He said he would be back on Sunday with our reports, but Mike pointed out that the yard was closed on Sundays (remembering the problems Helen and Geoff had had getting out to get the train back to Gent the previous Sunday) so he said he would be round to see us on Saturday. Mike had just asked him how much he was going to charge us just as his ‘phone rang and he had to dash off. Never mind, he’d promised us a good price for the two after earlier quoting 250 Eu for just us. He was gone by 10.30 a.m. Mike and I went to get a gas bottle refilled at Tahon (33.3c per litre - a full bottle cost 9 Eu) then picked up a pack of briquettes (3 Eu - we’d been paying over 5 Eu at Bricomarché in France) from their other depot down by the canal. On the way back to the boat, Mike said we should have taken the quittances with us and booked our trip for Monday. 

Back at the yard we dropped off the gas and coal, collected ours and Bill’s quittances and went back to lock two. The chief keeper, a familiar face from the last time we were at the chantier, was chatting to two guys with a van - he said here comes a lady to give me a few sous (pennies). We went up into the lock cabin, where a party of schoolchildren were sitting on the floor having a lecture in Flemish and French about the workings of the lock by the other keeper. The chef shuffled the papers, did a couple of reprints and charged me 50c to extend both our trips from Blaton to Maastricht! Well, he said I was going to pay him a few sous! I said we’d see him again in a couple of years’ time, we were off to Poland. He replied that he had only got five years left to work before he too was retired. Back on the boat I tidied up and gave Mike a hand to put the petrol and the generator back on board - we needn’t have moved them as our expert didn’t do a by-the-British-book check. Mike had found that the reason we could smell gas earlier while the bottle was filling was because the soldered joint on his fitting had split. 

He also noted that a washer was missing and I got the blame as I had carried the pipes back to the boat. (I found it in the boot of the car - I hadn’t lost it at all it had fallen off) Made lunch then went back to painting. It took both of us all afternoon to give the sides another coat of Comastic. We had three quarters of a tin left over - not enough to do a third coat and Mike was in no mood to crawl underneath to give the bottom a second coat. I went in to cook a stirfry for dinner, Thai garlic pork with carrots, onions and noodles. As I was preparing it Mike remarked that the water filter pump, which had been squawking for a couple of days, would soon be packing up. Just as he said it, it stopped. He had to stop what he was doing to move the ‘fridge out and swop over pumps. Bill loaned us his copy of “Waterways World” with the article about our expert written by David Blagrove. It made for interesting reading. Didn’t realise that he owned the trading péniches Medway and Towcester, which work as a pushtow pair, plus Stoke Breune, England and Elvis. Helen had told us that he was responsible for naming those boats as he is a confirmed Anglophile.

Friday 2nd April 2004 Dock at Peronnes.

Even milder, 11.5° C, paid for by a grey and showery day. I went to find the washer I’d been accused of losing and found it in the boot of the car. The liquid gas is very cold and probably loosened the washer during filling, I was told, after I’d threatened to stuff it up his nose for saying it was my fault it was lost, that he hadn’t got another one. Mike went out to paint the fenders with creosote and I put the Mac on to catch up with the log, while he suggested all sorts of other little jobs I should be doing, which included washing the cabin down in the rain. It had started raining heavily, so after he’d finished doing the fenders he came in and warmed himself some soup for lunch then went for a nap. 

The rain had turned to light drizzle. At 3.15 p.m. there was a loud crash and a lot of yelling, which woke Mike from his slumbers, the forklift had run into something as it came to shove a Frenchman’s yacht (which was in the slings from the next trolley on the next set of rails towards the boat hangars). Later I spied a flattened set of aluminium ladders - at least it wasn’t his masts! The Frenchman told us he’d built the yacht himself ten years earlier and had spent a lot of time in the West Indies, where he was due to return, but he wasn’t retired he told us he worked for a French TV company. They shoved the trolley down the tracks and he motored down the lake to moor on the outside of two cruisers by the boatyard’s back gates. Mike read the article in Bill’s WW about Jean-Marie Lemaire, expert fluvial, written by David Blagrove. Next task, I cleaned the roof off (it always gets filthy from the grinding off of old paint), sweeping it with a brush first, then using two bowls of water being careful not to let any drip down the sides. Mike wire brushed the gaps in the paint on the gunwales, I brushed off the dust, then he painted them with Comastic and sanded them. When I went inside it was 6.25 p.m.

Saturday 3rd April 2004 Dock at Peronnes.

9.4° C overnight. Windy, grey and showery. Mike took Bill with him to get some bread and find a cash machine. Meanwhile I got on with the usual chores and cleaning up some of the debris. They didn’t get back until 1.00 p.m. I was starting to get a little concerned about how long they were away. They’d got the bread easily enough, but Belgian cash machines were proving to be a pain. They’d been into Tournai and tried Fortis, ING (which used to be BBL) and lots of Bancontact Mister Cash machines and none of them would give them any money from their Nationwide cards. A return to France had been the only solution and then they’d gone to the supermarket at Condé-sur-l’Escaut. Made some lunch. Mike moved the welder and put it away, changed the engine oil and filters then he reinstalled the echo sounder in its tube (he didn’t add a bracing strap as he had planned to do as the upheaval to get at the bottom of the boat from the inside would have been too much - like complete and utter chaos). Then he cleaned up the prop and filed the edges (which he forgot to do last time) and replaced the bearings in the rudder. He put the HF wire up expecting to get a call from Peter to play Amateur radio, but he must have been too busy. I’d got a sore throat again! A lot of rude words were said about the amount of sneezing and coughing that goes on in supermarkets!

Sunday 4th April 2004 Dock at Peronnes.

A milder day, but grey and showery. We spent the morning putting the first coat of antifouling around the hull as far as the waterline. Bill ran the hose out and refilled his water tank, then handed it over to refill ours. After lunch,  Mike watched the first Formula One Grand Prix of the year, from Bahrain. M. Lemaire ‘phoned, he was on his way and could we meet him at the gates. I grabbed Mike’s wallet and went to find Bill, encountering the horrible little brown horse on the way - he tried several times to bite me as I dodged round obstacles to keep him at bay! (I asked Majorie about him later - she said she’d won him in a Tombola - she loves and hates him as he is so naughty, she’d got bruises herself where he’d grabbed her midriff with his teeth!) Bill had been out with Fanny around the yard and we both went to see M. Lemaire. The horse galloped past and stood at the gates rearing up to kick out his back legs before having another race around the yard. Through the locked gates, our expert handed over our reports and we handed over 200 Eu each. He was off on holiday he said. When we asked where to, he replied Miami - but only for four weeks, he said shyly! The water tank was full on our return, so Bill turned it off and I coiled up the end of the pipe nearest the boat. Once the motor racing on TV was over we went back to painting the final coat of antifouling. The 2.5 litre tin of Plastimo antifouling (French, but bought in Britain for an exorbitant £50) ran out and we used part of a 3/4 litre tin of Belgian-bought Epiphanes left over from last time (it takes 3 litres to do two coats). Painting finished, we tidied up and put stuff away, stowing the gangplanks back on the roof. Ready for splashdown tomorrow!

Sorry about the repeated photos - 35mm photos were very costly back then so far less were taken, blogs were a thing of the future!