The Story So Far - July 20th 2005

As many of you know John and Jenny retired at Christmas in order to pursue our dream of sailing around the world. It does not feel like retirement yet as being relatively new to sailing we have been doing every course and seminar going. Must be great for our brainpower!

We took delivery of the boat on 25th May after a 2 year wait, but have yet to see all our extra equipment fitted. We spent 4 weeks in the South of France - 2 of those being bitten to death by mosquitoes in Port Napoleon, which is near Port St Louis at the mouth of the Rhone in the Camargue.

Fortunately there were a number of interesting places to visit nearby and great little restaurants. The town of Arles is well worth a visit and Avignon , Aix, and Nimes are also close by.

We bought the boat from Sea Ventures and as part of the commissioning, they sent two of their guys down to oversee the handover and to help us familiarise ourselves with it. This was a great help as 'Tzigane' is 11 feet longer than our previous boat and much wider too.

We had intended to sail to San Remo and then slowly back to Nice to pick up Leila and Chris who were to be on trial!

Unfortunately because of the delays, that turned into a long drive to pick them up at Nice Airport. We spent a lovely afternoon in Antibes and then returned to the dreaded Port Napoleon where we all stood on the pontoon madly spraying ourselves with mosquito repellent and took refuge down below, aircon full on until it was time for dinner. Fortunately it was a great one at The Tamaris Hotel just down the road.

The next day after the safety brief and boat/equipment familiarisation, we went out for a trial sail and all was well. It is a long trek down the very shallow channel, but it was a very useful exercise and revision of the bouyage system for Chris and Leila.
The area is very industrialised with refineries, chemical and gas works in abundance, but we learned to love the 4 huge red and white chimneys as that was where we either turned for home or for the open sea.

Because we had done a Cross Border Leasing Scheme, our first 'real' passage was a night sail to San Remo. We were all a little nervous about this and Leila and Chris had never experienced a watch system before, so we split watches between Chris and I and Leila and John and all was fine except that Leila did get rather cold.

Arrived San Remo at about 9.30 in the morning and refuelled. We were pointed in the direction of the 'man' who could find us a berth and we were soon comfortably secured on the pontoon.