Many hands make light work (27/05 – 25/06)

Migennes

Arriving in Paris exactly one month after Ian, which included our 48th wedding anniversary, and the first we had not shared, it was with great anticipation that I stepped out of the taxi at Gare de Bercy. Ian had arranged to come up by train to meet me, and we would travel to Catharina Elisabeth together. I immediately phoned Ian, expecting to fall exhausted into his arms as he swept me up off the concourse, but I was somewhat disappointed to find that he was at Gare de Lyon, another major Paris train station, about 15 minutes walk from where I was. There had been some train changes on his line and we found ourselves forced to delay the meeting ‘hug’ a little while longer as he trotted between stations. Still, the meeting was more than worth it, and we then both took our seats on the now quite familiar train to Migennes, where Simon would meet us as he always does, and take us to the shipyard.

My first major task was flowers.

One warm afternoon, Simon drove us up the hill outside of town to the garden centre so I could pick up the bags of soil, the flowers and herbs, to start planting out my pots for the salon roof.

Then came the task of retrieving all the planters that we had stored in the yard over winter and arranging the varieties and colours. Such fun!

Even though we did not expect to be cruising very much this season, Catharina still had to look her best – and a colourful display of flowers is a big part of that.

In no time, I was settled firmly back into shipyard life. This included the frequent soirées on various boats. Ian introduced me to a number of people we were meeting for the first time this season, with whom he was already firm friends, and we renewed old friendships as boats arrived at the yard for one reason or another.

We fell into a comfortable camaraderie with a couple of Kiwis (Ruth and Roger) whose widebeam was up on the hard in the shipyard while they attended to some painting before starting their cruising season. Drinks soon became frequent card nights. Rollicking good fun. We also found ourselves being hosted on other boats as often as we welcomed the party crowd onto ours. It set the scene for what was to be a punishing year of social engagements with other boaters.

On one of these exchanges, we had been invited for a bbq on a cruiser belonging to some Aussies we had met last season. When we returned the favour a few days later, we found ourselves admiring each other’s outdoor tables. Ian and I have a long and sorry tale to tell about tables for our aft deck. We have, over the years, tried several different table styles and materials, but Ian has always felt they were never the right shape and size for our space. Last season we had bought a new wooden table, that we had to build, and even this was not quite what we wanted. When opened up, it left little space to maneuver around. Chatting to Melanie & David, we decided to swap tables. There was a brief discussion about the differences between our fairly new, unmarked table versus the hexagonal one they had. While ours had arrived in a large carton and was put together with the help of one of our French friends, their table had been found abandoned in the bushes beside a lock some time ago. Undaunted, I was happy to exchange the tables, knowing I planned to strip and sand it back to bare wood so I could apply oil from scratch. The tricky part was that at this point, their boat was rafted parallel to ours, but with another 4 boats between us. So it was quite an exercise, with David and Ian lugging the tables up and over a series of boats, none of which ever have their decks and railings set at the same level.

One lovely warm Sunday, nine of us piled into two cars (Aussies, Kiwis and English) and drove to the nearby town of Chablis to enjoy the market and sample some of the Chablis on offer.

It is a very picturesque town and while we have been there before, it was a perfect warm sunny day to revisit it and take a few more photos.

It was following this trip that we realised the group was becoming too unwieldy to comfortably fit on anyone’s aft deck, so we relocated to the shade of one of Simon’s old boats for our evening drinks, which very quickly became a nightly habit. And remained so for the entire season.

Ian also developed the habit of regularly cycling past the port moorings at Migennes and inviting everyone he met to join us in the evenings. This introduced us to several new cruising friends, from the Netherlands, Belgium, France and the UK. One of these chaps was Bos, a Dutchman who it turned out, was very good friends with Val Poore and Koos, who we have known for a number of years. Bos single-hand cruises his beautiful old barge Verandering and was on his way south from Rotterdam when we crossed paths.

There was one memorable evening when a rather violent storm blew through and we moved our chairs into the shelter of one of Simon’s workshops, but with open walls, the wind and rain followed us in. It could not dampen our spirits, however, and we just kept moving further back into the shadows to save the chips from getting too soggy as the rain belted in. But these storms, often accompanied by decent thunder and lightning, tend to pass over and move on relatively quickly.

My birthday fell on a Monday and we decided to reprise previous delightful meals we had enjoyed at Le Rive Gauche in Joigny, which, unusually for France, was open for lunch at the start of the week. Normally, we would be moored no more than a few hundred metres from the restaurant, and strolling to and from is a great pleasure. This time, we were still in Migennes, so we took the train between the two towns and had a wonderful lunch on the terrace. This restaurant has never disappointed.

Overlooking the River Yonne

Around the wonderful but punishing social schedule, there was work to be done. Last season we had achieved a lot of painting to repair and refresh Catharina after her excruciatingly long lonely Covid-internment. But there is always more to do. Towards the end of the 2022 season, we had bought another two sections of tarp (bache) for the wheelhouse, as the wooden windows were suffering from lengthy winter exposure. So the windows were not too bad this time. They got a few more coats of oil, but between us we repainted all of the rear of the wheelhouse and Ian stripped the wheelhouse door so I could treat that from scratch.

Some other work photos – balancing is a necessary skill and Catharina’s wide rubbing strake is a useful platform for work! And handy to have other boats to use as a platform to reach tricky bits.

Door in need of some work!

We discussed the crane and work schedule situation with Simon and he felt sure he could arrange a crane for mid-August and be ready to start work. It was now some ten weeks since Ian had arrived and five weeks after I had joined him and we had been working and socialising solidly for all that time – now it was the end of June.

We set about arranging plans so that we could attend the DBA Rally in Auxerre which would start on July 12 and made arrangements for cruising with our daughter Kathryn’s family when they would arrive at the end of July. We would then leave Catharina at Migennes to take a brief, ten-day tour of some French highlights with the family before returning to the shipyard where, we hoped, it would be to the rumble of two cranes.

While the Rally was about ten days away, we decided that there was nothing holding us to the shipyard so we would have a short cruise to nearby Joigny, moor at our favourite spot and, you guessed it, do some more work! Then, it would be just a short two-day cruise to Auxerre and the Rally.