After returning to the Netherlands and finishing the paperwork we're back in France working day and night to finish all kinds of maintenance our boat desperately needs.

We were just in time for the boat show in Cap D’Agde. Life was good, sun was shining and our boat looked good. We started planning and soon our wall was covered in post-its. French neighbors were grinning: “Ah The Dutch, they can’t help themselves, always undertaking elaborate planning”. They were right, the planning gave us a tiny sense of something to hold on to. Because what came next was a rollercoaster….

Our boat on the dry, an uneasy sight.

We started with maintenance on the engine. The engine was in okay shape, for a 30 year-old chunk of metal. But work needed to be done. The best way to do it is by hauling the entire thing out and have a mechanic work on it in a workshop. So.... we did that.

The lift out of our boat's engine.

After hours of watching and reading tutorials, we learned that scraping the hull by hand was best. But all the interested people that were swarming around the boat and Martijn (who’s face was permanently black from the scrapings), gave us a feeling that perhaps we were crazy? We opted for a company to apply a machine for a consistent even result. It wasn’t…great. But it allowed us to quickly move on towards painting and antifouling. Which took us 14 days to complete! You see, the paint, the tin, the hull, the air all need to be in specific temperature windows. It started to freeze during the nights and our time windows were getting smaller and smaller. It took 8 hours fulltime painting to paint the complete hull. And by the end we had given it 6 complete layers. You do the math….We weren’t sure if we needed to be happy our sad when the harbour police demanded we stop after 20:00. In the end, we pulled through and are sure we added speed to our boat. According to our surveyor this is essential if you enjoy having a beer in the harbour (“painting it tight could save you four days of beer drinking for one crossing!”).

Many layers of paint came off and went back on again.

When one of us was painting, the other was playing with Filise and taking up one of the other many jobs. We created a whole anchor out of cardboard to see which anchor would fit. We had a pretty disgusting day when we had to replace our toilets, which are now bright white shining. We’ve placed the baby net around the deck and we’ve deep cleaned the interior and all fabrics. We are not there yet, we are now a boat without sails and motor. Fingers crossed….

Almost ready to go back into the water again.

10th Dec 2022