Corsica
(October 02)
Summer highlights
(September 02)
Welcome to our neighborhood
(August 02)
Winter in St. Jean (Winter 02-03)
Copyright © Thomas and Abby Bloom, 2002
Cher Amis,
After our fall trip to Corsica, we settled into our slip in St. Jean for the winter. We wondered if we'd feel cooped up in our small space, cabin-feverish, impatient for spring. Not at all: so-called winter here is delightful. The sun is warm during the day, with temperatures usually in the sixties. There are still a few people on the beaches, especially where the sun warms the rocks that jut out into the water. We often eat lunch in the cockpit, though breakfast and dinner are inside now. Nights and early mornings are cool: we can sometimes see our breath outside when we get up, and one early morning the temperature dipped to just below forty degrees. Our electric heater, nine inches square, produces all the heat we need inside. We spend our time running the household, making friends from acquaintances and improving, maintaining and repairing Bloom to make sure she is ready for spring.
Running the Household
Managing this household is easy: it's so small. We can bring the whole place from very messy to fine in less than an hour. Our main cleaning product is vinegar, because in some places - the head, for example - we can't use anything stronger. Laundry is challenging. Under the hot sun we do most things ourselves in a large plastic tub. In cooler weather and for big things always, we use the laundry in Beaulieu. It's very expensive -- $10 for a ten-pound load, with no alternative available. I miss my washer and dryer. As always, my favorite household activities are shopping for and preparing food.
There are a few food merchants with whom we do business regularly in St. Jean, including the bakery, where we go twice a day, the butcher and the fruit and vegetable man. The bakery and the woman who runs it and the butcher in his shop are advertisements for the charm of France. The vegetable man is a young Lebanese who buys his produce on the other side of Nice and sets up shop on our plaza overlooking the sea six days a week in summer and on a reduced schedule for fall. Now he is off until spring. For staples and now for produce we go to Beaulieu, the neighboring town about two miles along the beautiful sea path. Our ship's store is also there, as well as the laundry and haircutter. The walk, which we do three or four times a week, keeps us in reasonable shape and is altogether a pleasure. For big shopping we go to Carrefour, the large supermarket in Monaco. We get there with various friends who have cars or by bus. Once on a calm November day when we were out of everything, we motored over in our dinghy. The ride there took about an hour, compared to the car trip of fifteen minutes. We tied up at the port in the Fontvieille section of the tiny country, did our shopping, loaded up and headed home, riding considerably lower in the water. With a wind behind us, the trip back took only forty minutes.
Food costs are comparable to those in the U.S. Baguettes are the biggest bargain at 68 cents each. They have to be eaten within a few hours of purchase, though, and we often buy a half, known as a demi-baguette (une demi-baguette, since baguettes are feminine), at a time. Other breads are costlier, heavier and last longer. Packaged varieties are available in the supermarkets but we have not tried them. Fruits and vegetables are comparable in price and generally fresher and better tasting than those we routinely get at home. I think that's because they aren't bred to travel, they come from nearer by and can be picked closer to the point of sale. Tomatoes, especially, are good even now and can come from Spain or Morocco. Meat is high. At the butcher's the quality is superb, but any cut of beef is typically at least $20 a kilo; his chickens cost about $10, though they are the best we've ever had. At Carrefour meat prices are lower but the trim and the taste aren't as good - exactly as you'd expect. Lamb, veal, rabbit and pork are plentiful with lamb and pork more reasonable than at home and veal and rabbit prices steep. Wine is the other great buy; for five or six dollars you get a ten-dollar bottle.
Preparing the food in our tiny galley is an adventure. We have a two-burner gas cook top and, as yet, no oven. We do some cooking, particularly when the days are long, on a gas-powered marine barbecue outside. I have enjoyed developing interesting meals using just the two burners. Soups and stews, especially those from my French bistro cookbook, have been our mainstays. Our refrigerator is top loading - a deep box with a couple of vertical dividers. We added plastic containers to help with organization, and now when I have to get something from the bottom I move the containers instead of every item one by one.
Spending Time with Friends
Our dock is quiet; even the two old Frenchmen who live on their boats are often gone. Our British friends, Eunice and Jeff, live for about half the year here, over perhaps five different stretches, and half the year in their home in northern England. We have loved exploring the hill towns to the east and west of St. Jean with them. They have been coming here for many years, are wonderful guides and, conveniently enough, keep a small car in the port lot. Both Eunice and Jeff are musical. She teaches piano and voice to students privately and directs shows for various theaters in their area, including, recently, Fiddler on the Roof. He, nominally retired, has great woodworking and other mechanical skills and does set and prop construction for the shows in addition to performing. Their boat is a Jeanneau, a popular French make, 32 feet long. They call it Ragtime, for their love of music and for Jeff's last name, Wragg. They have recently decided to buy a larger boat and have begun to research the market. We accompanied them to both Antibes and Menton to help them look; like most boaters, we are always happy to nose about a port to see what's doing. We are hoping to get to England to accept Jeff and Eunice's invitation to visit them there.
We enjoy another British couple too. Alan and Jenny work for three weeks of every four in London - Alan is an optometrist and Jen manages the business - and they spend the fourth week here. They have had their boat, a 36-foot Westerly called Tout Seul (All Alone) for twenty-four years; they bought their slip in St. Jean about four years ago. They have kept in touch with us over e-mail between visits and we hope to continue that after we leave.
Pierre and Christiane, the cruising couple we met on Corsica, visited us onboard for a few days on their way home from Paris, before they and their car took the ferry back. With their tiny, elderly poodles, Hercule and Etamine, they stayed in our aft cabin. As happened when we met them on Corsica, I had the wonderful and rare chance to translate whole conversations back and forth - great practice and a pleasure. Christiane says Pierre and Tom are like twins - comme les jumeaux - in their enthusiasm for boats and fascination with mechanical and electrical workings. Pierre was particularly helpful with one thorny wiring problem. We'll sail in tandem with them this spring, starting from Corsica, on to Elba, then Sardinia and Sicily. We feel like their visit cemented our friendship in the same way the time we spent with Jeff and Eunice recently confirmed our friendship with them. It's interesting how it happens.
I have a new friend in Ainslie, a gutsy New Zealander who up and moved to Beaulieu after her husband died four years ago. Recently she came to dinner with her new love, a charming French interior space planner and decorator whose dream is to move onto a boat. He wants an older, wooden motor yacht of perhaps 22 meters (our boat is just over 11 meters long, 37 feet) that he can refurbish. He is a skilled woodworker with a designer's imagination. Andre and Ainslie have begun to look for the boat together.
We've gotten to know our French neighbors better too. Dany and Auguste's 36-foot Beneteau, L'Eugenie, is two boats down from us. Recently they invited us to join them and two other French couples for an 'aperitif,' another opportunity for my French, as the two other couples don't speak English. The 'aperitif' invitation has been something of a puzzle until now. Sometimes it means a drink and a snack -- pretzels or pistachios. Apparently, though, if someone invites you for an aperitif after 6.30, it means food but not quite dinner. There were various hors d'oeuvres on the table to go with the wines and other drinks -- octopus salad, salmon mousse and baguette, a ham-olive-cheese bread, cheese puffs and then a dessert at the end. So our hosts didn't make a whole dinner, and they didn't use a dinner's worth of dishes or have the cleanup -- all more difficult from the small galley on a boat -- but everyone had plenty to eat and the lively party went on until about 11. What a great way to entertain; I'm going to try it.
We made friends, too, with Beate and Karl, both teachers in Mulheim in northern Germany. Every few years they take a year off to sail Fee (pronounced Fay, meaning sprite), their strong and beautiful Halberg-Rassey 35. This year they spent some time in St. Jean. Our conversations were interesting, not least from a language viewpoint. Karl has English as his second language, but not much French. Tom manages in German but doesn't have much French either (though it's improving). Beate has French, but little English and I have French and no German at all. So the talk went round in the three languages and ultimately everyone understood everything that anyone said. Beate and Karl were with us when we learned of Ava's birth, and they promptly uncorked a bottle of champagne to help us celebrate. We ran into them again in Antibes where we had gone to have some work done on our boat, but we haven't seen them since. I hope our paths will cross again. I think this coming together and leaving is a characteristic of the cruising life.
We have enjoyed spending time with Lupo, the intrepid German sailor I mentioned in my first newsletter, and his French wife Corinne. They make their home near Hamburg, where Lupo is a dentist. Corinne's parents live in Nice. Lupo is out on his thirty-two foot Beneteau racer as often as he can be. He actively seeks heavy weather, for practice, and talks about flying his spinnaker in thirty-five knots of wind. Corinne prefers calm seas.
On a flight to Amsterdam last year, on our way home from having bought our boat, we met Eric, a young accountant who works for a shipbuilding company in Monaco. His firm builds two or three custom yachts a year, starting at about 65 meters and $50 million dollars. Eric lives in Cap d'Ail, a town near St. Jean, with his wife Chrystel and Bastien, their five-year-old son. Eric and Chrystel have visited us on Bloom and hosted us in the house they are renovating on a hillside overlooking the Monegasque port of Fontvieille and the sea. We are planning to show them their home from the water for the first time when they come aboard for a sail in March.
In November, friends from Minneapolis visited us. Deb and Fred joined us for five days after spending time in Paris. Fred, at least six feet four if he's an inch, laughed when he saw our aft cabin and they stayed in a nearby hotel.
They were cheerful when it rained every day but one -- and we changed our touring plans in France and Italy only slightly to accommodate the downpours. On the sunny day we sailed to Villefranche, our favorite anchorage, hung out in the bay there for lunch and after, took lots of pictures, and sailed on home.
We enjoyed a visit from my cousin Valli, who lives in Paris and came with her husband Pierre, their daughter Lauren and Pierre's mother, Alia. Alia lives not too far from us, above a mountain town west of Nice. She bought a ruin, as she calls it, and refurbished it to make a small and charming home. We visited her there, walking the hills, stopping at her neighborhood café and touring the old streets of the eleventh-century town where she lived while she was building. From Alia's neighborhood we could see the snow-covered peaks of the French Alps to the north, and south across the hills to the sea. Alia is a sailor -- we hope to sail with her this spring before we leave the Cote d'Azur.
Preparing Bloom
Preparing Bloom for spring has been our winter work. She's in great condition, but the previous owner was a coastal sailor and didn't need some of the equipment and arrangements that we want. And, as every sailor knows, there is always work to do on a boat.
Our biggest and most important installation was the Monitor wind vane, our second self-steering device. Homer, the below-decks autopilot that came with the boat, uses a lot of electricity, which we generate at sea using our engine. Over time, on long passages, it's not as practical as the wind-driven Monitor. Tom had had this, his favorite piece of equipment, on a previous boat and we brought it to France for Bloom. Ours is the first installation of a Monitor wind vane on a Sweden 370, and the manufacturer had to design and build, with the help of our measurements and photos, the stainless steel holding brackets needed to support the device on Bloom's stern. After getting the brackets, Tom spent a couple of weeks, on and off, installing the wind vane. In place, it looks like a miniature oil-drilling rig, awkward, but solid and useful. Now we must modify our swim ladder, also on the stern, so we can get in and out of the water, though perhaps not so easily as before.
We have installed our new ICOM single sideband radio (SSB). This will give us weather forecasts by FAX, allowing us to plan our routes taking into account distant as well as near-by weather patterns. The SSB will enable us to participate in a Med-net, a daily check-in with other cruisers in the Mediterranean, who share information and generally make cruising a more congenial and probably safer life. We have purchased the parts to have Bloom's backstay modified to become the antenna for the SSB and arranged with a rigger to do that work. Also, Tom discovered that Bloom's steering quadrant had slipped out of alignment. This is the mechanism that connects the helm - our steering wheel -- to the rudder. He was able dismantle the steering apparatus, oil and grease it and return it to proper alignment.
We had a third reefing line installed in our main sail. The reefing lines allow us to reduce the size of the sail in strong winds, so we do not become overpowered. Bloom's mainsail came equipped with two reefing lines, which are fine for most conditions, but the third will give us an extra measure of safety. Having even a small amount of sail up in a very strong wind helps keep the boat stable and makes steering in big seas possible. We made a few changes below decks as well. We added and modified kitchen and other storage spaces inside, and got rid of some things we can do without. We reorganized our cockpit lockers to be more useful. They are unbelievably large and it's too easy just to stuff things into them. We are mapping our storage compartments inside and out to be sure we can find things when we need them.
A number of boat chores remain. The instrument panel for the engine, mounted in the cockpit, isn't working, and we have taken it out for testing. We have seventy meters of chain on our primary anchor, and we have purchased small plastic inserts to indicate how much chain we have let out or pulled in. To install these colorful pieces, we'll unhook the chain and spread it out on the dock. We'll develop a pattern to indicate lengths of chain, insert the plastic pieces into the chain links according to the pattern and then hook the chain back up to the anchor. We carry four anchors for use with different sea bottoms -- sand, mud, rock, grass -- and any of these can be connected to the main anchor chain, stored in a locker in Bloom's bow. We carry additional chain and rope to deploy a second and even a third anchor in very windy conditions or in a crowded anchorage. With anchors, as with autopilots and other equipment, redundancy enhances safety.
Our teak deck needs repair. The black caulking between the planks keeps water out and allows for expansion and contraction. The previous owner made repairs to the caulking with a material that oozes in the hot sun -- so we have tar-like stains on the back of much of our clothing. (No wonder most cruisers keep their sailing duds separate from the ones they wear ashore.) We got a two-part polysulfide caulking in the US to repair the repairs. As soon as the weather is a bit warmer and the deck completely dry, we'll pull out the old stuff and put in the new.
Our anchor light at the top of the mast is out. I hoisted Tom up there to investigate, using a line and winch, with a second line and winch for safety. He will either have to replace a part up there, or correct wiring down below. In any case, he will go up again to take the backstay down so the rigger can modify it as our SSB antenna. Our cabin floor, called the sole, is showing wear and needs varnishing. We'll do that by removing the panels and sanding and varnishing them on the dock, then replacing them. For safety on deck, we had already installed jacklines. These are made of nylon webbing and run from bow to stern, port and starboard. When we go on deck at night or in big seas any time, we hook ourselves onto these lines. Our high-tech life vests come with the hardware to do that, and we have harnesses -- expandable attachment lines -- that hook to the vests with one end and the jacklines with the other. We still need to install folding pad-eyes -- hook-on hardware -- in the cockpit so in really bad weather we can be attached to the boat, not only on deck, but in the cockpit as well. We do a lot in preparation for conditions that will happen rarely, or never.
We will make two modifications in the main cabin: a lee cloth and a galley strap. The lee cloth is a piece of canvas attached permanently under one of the settees that can be attached with straps to the ceiling, so that someone can sleep in the main cabin in a rolling sea without falling onto the floor. Tom, as captain, wants to be able to do that during our passages, leaving the two sleeping cabins for crew who are off-watch. The galley strap, like the jacklines on deck, is a piece of nylon webbing that will hook onto the two sides of the L-shaped galley, to keep the cook in the kitchen in a rolling sea. I'm not much looking forward to cooking in a rolling sea, but it will happen. In a bad storm I expect we'll break out the peanut butter and never mind the rest. We are planning to install a solar panel array. The Med is so sunny in the summer that the panel will greatly increase our ability to generate electricity -- and, with fuel savings, will pay for itself in a year.
The last piece of work on the boat this spring will be to paint the bottom of the hull with an anti-fouling paint. We will have this done during the first week of April at a boatyard at Antibes, after we leave our slip in St. Jean. The yard will haul Bloom out of the water for the two days the work will take while we continue to live onboard. We know the owner of the yard, Eric DeStefano, who has been generous in allowing us to tie up there without charge, in the port that is otherwise the most expensive (for mooring) and busiest on the Riviera. And so if we want to stay a bit longer, or if the weather isn't promising, we'll have a few extra days' holiday at the museums and markets of Antibes, before setting off in earnest for places south and east in the Med.
A bientot,
Abby