Getting ready for the water

Wednesday 25 May

New Diet and Health Regime

Just spend 6 weeks working on a yacht, pigging out on a wondrous variety of French wines, breads and cheeses, olives and patés, butter soaked artichokes, asparagus and garlic mussels, chips and saucisson sec, fresh pasta with creamy carbonara sauce, (and so on and so on) and you’re guaranteed to lose a couple of inches of belly fat as well as firming up all sorts of muscles all over, but especially on the upper body.  The trade off here is scrapes and bruises (I fell off a large oil drum when Mike removed the bucket that was my second step), gashes and scabs (the companionway steps collapsed under me when Mike didn’t attach them correctly), huge itchy welts (nasty little ‘no-see-ums’ which we can’t blame on Mike), and skin as scaly as a snake’s (which we also can’t blame on Mike).  Other plusses are natural bleaching and straightening of the hair (if you’re into that kind of thing), sun tan (albeit rather patchy) and short nails (no need for manicures).  Over and above all that, the satisfaction you get from doing so much identifiably useful work is incalculably good for the soul.  Believe me.

We have a new friend, a South African chap called Harry who is originally from Johannesburg but currently lives in Australia six months of the year and sails for the other six months.  He told us he had visited Rhodesia as a child on a few occasions as he had an aunt living there.  This aunt used to live with (he wasn’t quite sure what the relationship had been) a heart surgeon, Mr Graham.  When I was nine years old this same Mr Graham, who had recently returned from America, performed a successful operation to repair the ‘hole’ in my heart. Small world.

It has become appallingly hot – much more so than I feel it should be for this time of year.  We have erected our shade cover over the cockpit which helps a lot.  It is a green mesh fabric which keeps the sun out but allows the breeze to pass through. There has been very little rain this year and we hear the rivers are low.  Harry, and his wife who has not arrived yet, are also taking the canal trip.  His boat (Malua) has such a deep draught that he will have to travel with only half his capacity of water and fuel in an attempt to keep his keel up.  He is quite concerned about the lack of water in the rivers. 

Mike has been agonising over the un-stepping of the mast, understandably really as it is no small thing and our first time ever.  He walks back and forth with a worried frown talking to himself or to me discussing the mechanics of it all.  He is particularly concerned about how to position the mast on the deck as we will be carrying it with us.  We have been watching other boats come in and out of the marina having their masts un-stepped (removed) or re-stepped (put back in) but boat shapes vary and everyone arranges things differently.  Then a young Danish chap, Piet, (with a wife and three small kids) arrived in a similar boat to us having just come down the canals.  Piet had wooden cross bars made to hold his mast and handed these over to a delighted Mike.  He came for a cup of coffee, over which Mike gave him all our Mediterranean paper charts.  A good swap for both parties.  We spoke again of a possible Scandinavian trip next year and Piet offered to let us have charts and pilot books if we ever do it.  We exchanged email addresses.

All the electrics that run up the mast have to be detached and Mike spent a whole day this week doing just that.  It wasn’t easy as screws and bolts get frozen over the years and take a lot of greasing and soaking to unscrew.  However, he succeeded with a bit of help from the obliging spanner boy (me).  I have drawn complicated diagrams of where each coloured wire goes.

We’ve moved away from computer chess and novels and now tend to spend our evenings studying our Fluviacartes and reading various extracts from other people’s blogs on the canal trips.  It’s all very exciting.

Thursday 26 May 

The wind instrument arrived today and it’s the wrong thing.  It is only the display and doesn’t include the doofy (anemometer) at the top of the mast that actually picks up the wind.  Bugger.  Our display works fine – it is the other bit we needed.  Anyway, it is our mistake - I have checked the ad in eBay and it never did mention that part of it.  So, I emailed the seller and told him our mistake and asked if he could get the rest of the instrument, and if not, we will have to return it.  We are so disappointed, and that’s another thing back on the list. 

However, today I re-sanded and oiled the cockpit and it looks very nice.

For the past three weeks whilst working on the outside of the boat, painting the top blue stripe and cleaning up the gelcoat, I have been using some scaffolding borrowed from an absentee sailor.  He arrived back today so I went over and introduced myself.  I’d not quite finished my work and was afraid he wanted it back.  However, he was charming and said I could continue to use the scaffolding for another two days.  Now I’ve got to get on with it.

Friday 27 May

Our new Irish friend, Camilla, who wants to borrow the scaffolding when I’ve finished with it, very kindly gave us a lift into town today in her car.  We took advantage and got a gas refill as well as doing a really big shop.  We were very grateful as this will save us a lot of hassle at the last moment.  She and her husband Chris came for drinks in the evening.  Their boat, which has no name, has been here for five years and they come down (by car from Scotland) and work on it every year.  They are hoping to get it into the water by September and actually take it for a sail.

Saturday 28 May 

Finally, we have finished all our work.  Knackered.  Both of us.

Here she is – very fine.  You can see the cross bars at the back which will support the mast.

Sunday 29 May

Mike took himself off to the beach for the last time – he said it was perfect and very crowded, lots of pretty girls in bikinis.  I stayed home to recover as my back was hurting, but eventually decided to get some laundry done.  Down by the tap I met Marc, the scaffolding owner, and he offered me his washing machine.  He has a washing machine aboard his boat!  I said Yes, Please.  I’d already done the clothes, but took the opportunity to wash all our manky bed linen.  Lovely man.  He came and had a drink with us this evening.

Waiting for the machine to do its job (two loads I had) I made four jars of apple chutney.  Taking advantage of the free electricity as it may be a while before we have shore power again.  Our batteries are not in good nick.  We do have a brand new starter battery for the engine which is the most important thing.   The weather has cooled off a lot thank goodness, though it is still sunny and very dry.

Monday 30 May 

This is going to be our last day on the hard.  We’ve booked to be lifted up this evening, after which we will clean and then paint the very undersides of the rudder and keel as well as the side patches currently covered by the metal struts.  We’ll spend the night in the sling and then go into the water first thing tomorrow, Tuesday, morning.   We are so looking forward to being in the water again.  As we are going to be very busy tonight, we are going over to Port Napoleon marina for a good three course workman’s lunch, to use the internet, and see Harry who’s gone into the water today.  A hard northerly wind is forecast for Wednesday so we’ve booked to have our mast un-stepped on Thursday.  The plan is to motor up the canal to Port-Saint-Louis du Rhone marina on Friday, do our last minute grocery shopping and fill up with diesel and then take the 6.30am bridge lift into the first lock of the Rhone on Saturday.  Yabba Dabba.

Port-Saint-Louis

Sunday 15 May

We’ve worked so hard this week.  I finished cleaning up the edges of the blue stripe around the cockpit and then polished all the white gel coat round the cockpit and the coach roof.  With Mike’s help I have finished sanding the toe rail, then washed it and the whole deck.  The top of the boat now looks lovely.

The antifouling on the bottom continues to be a battle.  The electric sander is still not available and hand sanding is just not doing the trick so we attacked it with paint scrapers.  It is dead tiring but we’ve made good headway.  We’ve agreed to do another couple of days and then stop, no matter what.  I can’t get on with the last blue stripe or polishing the topsides until the bottom is finished.

Our darling Patrice continues to look after us

Mike’s friend Jean Loup (not Jean Luc) has gone off sailing with his wife, who finally turned up.  Our old friends Ralph and Elaine on their catamaran Le Chatelaine, who we met on our first stay here three years ago, have turned up and they came for dinner last week.  Their plan this year is to cruise the Canal du Midi.  We’ve met a few other people but they are never around for long – people are coming and going at an amazing rate.

Wednesday 18 May

The road from Port Saint Louis, approaching the entrance to Navy Service marina with our new restaurant ‘Le Yacht Club’ in the centre.  It is well patronised at lunch time, as evidenced by all the cars out front.

Unbelievably, finally, the sanding on the bottom of Forever is finished.  Yaay.  Mike painted the grey primer coat (which looked so beautiful) and then the first coat of navy blue antifouling, which looks tres elegant.  I got going with the white topsides, but it was too exhausting to polish it all by hand so I have simply lightly sanded with 1500 grit paper and then polished with some oily stuff called Lustre which has deepened and shined up the overly white and powdery look of the gelcoat.  It looks lovely.  But it is slow work and I do a bit every day.

 

We salvaged some carpet off cuts in a deep blue, removed our shabby old carpets and cut up the new carpet to fit.  We even bought a tin of glue.  However, we’ve decided the quality is not quite good enough so we will wait till we find something better.  There are no carpet shops anywhere near here.  As one lady in town said to me “Nous sommes vraiment perdus ici,” which I think translates to something like: “We’re really out in the boon docks here” - and she’s right.   

Our friend in Bucks, Allan, posted documents from home proving our residence in UK and last week we rushed into town and saw the bank manager (the new chap who’s now in his second week in this job), who has changed his mind and says we also need to prove that we pay tax in the UK.  Well, we don’t any more so that’s going to be tricky.  Grrr.  Annoying and disappointing.  I suppose it makes sense that they need to know where you pay tax – after all that is THE most IMPORTANT thing in life, isn’t it?  Anyway, it is too late now to get more documents so we will have to wait till later.   We are determined to leave here at the beginning of June.

Since we bust our wind instrument on a tree in Florida in 2003, we have continued to sail quite happily without any idea of wind speed.  Who cares how hard it is blowing?  In fact, the actual speed is irrelevant – you adjust your sails to what is tolerable.  So, for six years we just made it up which was so much more fun.  As we know, all sailors overestimate the wind and Mike has been able to exaggerate to his heart’s content without his wife being able to contradict him.  The direction of the wind is the important bit and that part of the instrument has always worked.  However, this is the kind of thing the other people (potential buyers and surveyors) get upset about so we have ordered a new one from eBay – it should arrive any moment.  It is a good brand (Autohelm) and monitors both wind speed and direction and was rather expensive.  Another job ticked off on my list, though we will only install it when we re-step the mast in Rouen.

And speaking of the list – I’ve had admin things like insurance and our river licence to worry about.  We haven’t insured Forever since we left Panama in 2004, which has given me some sleepless nights along the way but we have been lucky and nothing bad has happened.  However, I have now renewed the insurance, paid the premium and we can forget about that for another year.  Also on the internet (a wonderful thing, you have to admit) I found the river licence on the VNF (Voies Nationals de France) website and paid for a Freedom Pass (the whole year) which is only €10 more than the four month Summer licence.  So, we can take as long as we like to get to Normandy - till 31 December if we want.  Another tick.  There is gratifyingly little left on my list.

Port Saint Louis is an odd sort of place, lacking the usual charming structure and architecture of most small French towns.  It used to be a large fishing port at one stage – back in the fifties, I think, and a lot of the buildings are therefore quite recent and not very interesting.  There’s even a derelict old railway line running alongside the canal to the old fishing port near our Navy Service marina.  The well rusted tracks are supported on lovely old wooden sleepers which look suspiciously like teak.  Some clever clogs in Zimbabwe made a very good furniture business out of highly varnished teak sleepers, acquired for free (or very cheaply) when the government (at the time) decided to replace all the old wooden sleepers with concrete.  Though slightly cleaned up they still boasted every bolt hole and crack that proved them to be genuine old sleepers.  It became the trendy furniture to have at one stage (deservedly so as it is truly beautiful) but it didn’t take long before they had used up all the obsolete railway sleepers in the country and had to move on to Zambia and other neighbours.

Anyway, back to Port Saint Louis’s fishing heritage.  On the other side of the road to the old railway line and the currently marked ‘Port de Pêche du Saint Louis du Rhône’ is this gloriously dilapidated and abandoned old building.  Look at that shark – straight out of Shark’s Tale!  

Neighbours and boat work

Sunday 1 May

In the hopes of getting Forever absolutely perfect we decided to re-paint the three blue stripes, one around the cockpit and the other two on the hull.  This was my project so I got started with the cockpit stripe and spent all day Friday putting masking tape along the edges and then sanding down the old paint.  On Saturday morning (having totally forgotten about the Royal wedding which we missed) I applied the first coat of blue paint before we went to market and then in the afternoon I applied the second coat.  Exhausted, but pleased as punch I removed the tape in the early evening and discovered I’d used the wrong tape - the blue paint had bled through and streaked both UP AND DOWN into the white gelcoat!  I actually sat on the deck and cried as I seriously thought I’d ruined the boat.  Mike had gone for a couple of beers with another chap so I was glad to be alone for my little breakdown.  It took me positively ages to get all the tape off – nasty paper stuff got stuck to the gelcoat and wouldn’t come off – snivelling all the while.  Mike eventually came home and I braced myself for a well-deserved bollocking.  However, he was a little pissed and therefore not as shocked as he might have been.  He took it in rather good spirit, gave me a bit of friendly support and then toddled off for a shower.  Still feeling totally sick but relieved he hadn’t gone ballistic, I decided to try my best to remove the streaks and imagine my surprise when they almost all came off with a little scrubbing with paint thinner. I couldn’t believe it.  I was worried the paint would set overnight and it wouldn’t come off the next day so I ploughed on in the dark that evening determined to do a good job.  Mike returned from the shower more sober and pleased the disaster had been resolved. I went to bed soon after supper physically worn out and in a funk of depression at my own stupidity.  After a good rest with no work all morning, I continued the job today, lightly sanding a few areas where a bit of blue shadow was left on the gelcoat and I must say it looks immaculate. As Patrice would say - ‘impeccable’.  I am so very pleased.

For his part, Mike has been very innovative in repairing a piece in the engine that is no longer available.  Otherwise, the poor chap continues with sanding the antifouling.  Patrice’s man came to take back the electric sander, then the next day we were told it has broken and gone in for repair.  So, in the interim he is working by hand.  It is horrible and exhausting.

I have finished the rudder and started a bit of repair work on the gelcoat.  The gelcoat on Forever is a soft creamy colour and the repair kit I have is bright startling white.  There’s nothing to be done about it but it is a shame as the little repaired bits will stand out.  Today I made templates to protect the name “Forever” and the gold printed “HR 352” on the sides of the boat within the main blue stripe.  Tomorrow I start to sand the blue and then I will paint it.  This time I have bought the correct masking tape.

The marina is beginning to fill up and there are a lot more people floating around, particularly with children and teenagers and there are lots of dogs about.  But still, there are not a lot of liveaboards and we miss our Swedish friends on Pinta, who sent an email recently from Corsica.  However, we have become matey with a very nice French couple, Jean Pierre and Jacqueline on Gayatri, four boats down and they have invited us for cocktails tomorrow – they both speak excellent English.

Normally when yachties find themselves living next door the two boats become friendly and end up sharing beers or meals and assisting each other with work, or at the very least they exchange pleasantries on a regular basis. We have a French Swiss couple living on the next boat, younger than us, both tall and slim with long dark hair tied back in a loose sort of bun.  She, Mara, is charming and friendly and has started with every indication of being a lovely neighbour.  He, on the other hand and whose name we still don’t know, wants absolutely nothing to do with us.  We think that perhaps he doesn’t like the English because he seems friendly enough with other people.  It is bizarre, and the first time we’ve had such a neighbour in eight years aboard.  In fact, the French generally are an amiable and friendly bunch.  Everyone here greets everyone else, all the time.  People who pass our boat, and most folk do as we are very central, look up and make eye contact, smile and sing ‘bonjour’.  Even young kids whizzing past you on a bike will make eye contact and sing ‘bonjour’.  With the notable exception of our neighbour, we all do it no matter who we are talking to.  I laugh to think that we English unwittingly sing ‘bonjour’ to each other, as do the other nationalities. 

I cycled into town today on my bike and when I got to the lock I dismounted and waited as there was a cyclist coming along the narrow path across the bridge for pedestrians and cyclists.  When he reached my side this courtly old gentleman with a Charles Boyer moustache nearly fell off his bike lifting his hat in a salute.  He gave me an enchanting smile and said “Bonjour Madame et merci beaucoup.”  The sort of thing that totally makes your day.

Finally, I have to admit that Mike is using the ladies showers!  Ha ha.  He says the water temperature in the men’s is ridiculous – either boiling hot or cold.  So now we know.  I presume the office has been told but no one cares.

Tuesday 3 May

We had a very nice evening with Jean Pierre and Jacqueline, and ended up staying for dinner.  Sadly, for us, they are leaving today for Savoie where they have a small farm in the mountains. They grow all their own vegetables during the summer – just like we plan to do.

They will be driving back to Port Saint Louis in the middle of June and we have made tentative plans for them to stop and join us somewhere on the Rhone, as we hope we will already have begun our river trip by then.

Saturday 7 May

I have finally finished the second blue stripe and it looks fantastic.  My templates for the name “Forever” and the gold HR352 on each side were perfect so it looks very professional if I say so myself.  So, that’s two down and one to go.   The bottom stripe along the water line should be the easiest as it is a straight bar with no interruptions and I can work from ground level. Working from scaffolding is a real strain.  I have also finished smoothing the epoxy filler on the rudder and it’s ready for priming and painting.  Yesterday I cleaned out the forward water tank, checked and oiled all the sea cocks, oiled the windlass motor and scrubbed the bathroom.  Today I started sanding the teak toe rail and was using Patrice’s electric sander.  However, Mike thought Patrice may not be happy so I phoned him and he said he’d rather I didn’t use it for wood.  Very disappointed, I did a bit more by hand but it is extremely tiring and I don’t know if I have the courage to do the whole thing.  My ‘carpal tunnel syndrome’ has reared its ugly and painful head again and I know it is all the sanding.  I have no fingerprints left on my fingers!  It’s a pity – the bit I’ve done looks great.  Perhaps if I have a long rest now I will feel stronger later.  There is still the job of polishing the white gelcoat – groan.  However, when the gelcoat is polished and the three stripes are all the same blue colour, the boat will look brand new.

Mike continues with the awful job of sanding the antifouling and is slowly making headway. The electric sander has never come back so he continues to work by hand.  He’s completed the repair of the internal cooling system on the engine and replaced the coolant and he’s repainted the engine.  It looks very fine.  We still have to do the external cooling system and then we will be ready to try and start the engine.

Mike’s buddy, Jean Luc, who was in the French navy for years, came round for dinner last night and downloaded the free navigation software called CPN from various dvds he had.  It includes charts of the whole world and we are delighted to have that.  I had a similar program on my old computer but didn’t know how to transfer it to this new computer, and now I don’t have to bother.  After chatting with Ulla and Lennart about Sweden, we are quite tempted to head north and do some sailing around Sweden and Norway.  They say the summers are wonderful and there are literally thousands of little islands one can cruise around.  It’s a thought anyway.

I had a nice long chat with my sister Pairose today.  The previous day she had attended the reading of the final report on the Inquest into the London bombings on 7 July 2005 when the lovely Jamie, her son and our nephew, was so tragically killed.  A necessary part of the legal process, the Inquest has been a trying business for bereaved loved ones yielding new and not always welcome information.  There are some who still have questions, but for my sister it is a chapter she is glad to close.

Sunday 8 May

Mike has gone to the beach today and I am having a rest day.  We’ve had a hard south wind for days but today it is pleasantly calm – still very sunny and warm.  The internet connection in the restaurant is rather erratic and I’ve been so busy lately that I haven’t posted anything.  But I will try today - hurrah, I have succeeded.

Birthdays and lists

Easter Sunday

The rest of Friday and Saturday were overcast and rainy, cold and windy.  Good respite from work anyway and we’ve done a lot of reading and playing chess.  The rain has settled the dust, thank heavens.  I went to the restaurant yesterday to do some emailing but having bought my expensive drink with the last of our cash and settled myself at an uncomfortably high bar table, there was no connection.  Very annoying, and I haven’t enough money to buy bread this morning.  It’s calm today, so back to work.  It remains cloudy and cool but the sun is threatening to come out.

Easter Monday,

It’s Mike’s birthday today.  He’s 61 and has finally caught me up. We went for dinner in the marina restaurant – Mike had a steak with Roquefort sauce and I had duck breast, both cooked rare and totally scrumptious.  It was very pleasant sitting out on the veranda watching the sunset, before large black clouds started roiling in from the west, surrounded by mozzies and listening to frogs croaking.  It could have been anywhere in Africa.  I took my computer along and managed a bit of emailing at the same time.  

Mike has worked like a dog all day yesterday and today with the electric sander and covered himself from head to foot in nasty poisonous red paint (again).  There just seems to be SO MUCH of this bloody paint.  Trouble is, lazy sod, he has just lightly sanded in the past and put another coat over the top.  This time around, we are stripping down to the basics so it’s a lot of hard work.  The job is going slowly and painfully because the circles of sandpaper won’t stick to the electric sander for more than a few minutes before they fly off into the stratosphere and you have to take a new one.  I run around and retrieve the rejected bits of paper and find that the sandy side is hardly used but the other side just won’t stick to the machine anymore.  Bastard.  

I have been working on the rudder (that’s the back bit that slides from side to side to turn the boat from left to right - or port to starboard if you must) scraping old bits of glue filler ready for replacing so we can make it smooth and paint over.  The slight cracks that have developed in the paintwork over the normal design of the rudder have caused panic in some potential buyers (who don’t know what they are looking at) so we are making it all lovely and smooth and clean again.

There are so many things to be done to get the boat ready that I make long copious lists so I won’t forget anything.  I mainly make lists because I just love ticking things off as I get them done.  But the trouble with lists is that as you tick things off so you tend to add new ones, and the worst is when you spend all day labouring and realise that not one of the jobs done was on your list in the first place!  I’m always rather childishly tempted to add them to my list just so I can cross them off again.  Equally unpleasant is having to re-do jobs.  For example, one of my first jobs when we arrived was to scrub and then lightly sand the interior section of the cockpit and then oil the wood with Tung Oil.  We’ve always preferred that rather matt look to the very shiny look of varnished wood.  However, there was a hole in the oil bottle and the oil had become rather thick, so it hasn’t sunk in nicely.  Rather it sits sluggishly on top of the wood looking dull and has this annoying propensity to gather every particle of dust, and there’s plenty about.  So, I have to start again, re-sanding and re-oiling with thinned down oil.  Do I need this kind of aggro?

One item I must put on my list, because I forget to do it every day, is to shave my legs.  A veritable forest has sprouted up which is a bit of a disgrace because I wear knee high pants and my skinny, heavily bewhiskered little calves hang out on show.  Nobody seems to notice but perhaps they are too polite to comment.

Mike is a great scavenger and returns from the rubbish dump with all manner of interesting and useful things – most notably some good quality cockpit cushions and a fan.  It’s amazing what people chuck out, like these very nice cushions.

Tuesday 26 April

After a busy morning (Mike in the engine and me in the laundry) we scrubbed up as best we could, jumped on our bikes and went into town for our appointment with the Société Générale bank.  The gentleman we saw was very nice (I kept my hairy legs well tucked under his table) but he wasn’t happy with our letter of residence from the Marina as this is not our principal residence.  It was his first day at work here and he had never heard of the marina.  However, with proof of our residence in UK he will happily open us an account.  Pas de problème.  So, now we just need our good friend Allan to post us a recent utility bill from home.  We will be pleased as it annoys us to pay huge bank fees every time we draw cash here.

Wednesday 27 April

Market day again and we found some good bargains.  We very cannily arrive late when the stall holders are packing up and want to get rid of as much stuff as possible before they go.  They put bunches of stuff like four sweet red peppers, five beef tomatoes, seven avocados, eight apples, or nine pears in a basket for €1 each.  We buy, lots.  I made my own tomato paste for a Bolognese sauce and it was the best sauce I’ve ever made.

Man of the Year

The delectable young Patrice (our man in the marina), has won, by a wide margin, our Man of the Year award.  Patrice is a marine surveyor by trade and has a business in the marina called Odyssey Marine that specialises in hull treatment.  In spite of being extremely busy, he has found lots of time for us and given us good useful advice on what to do on the boat, as well as lending us the sanding machine and giving us loads of sand paper for which he will take no payment. He’s a darling and we adore him.  Thinking he had no English I have always conversed with him in French which is, of course, so good for me, but yesterday Mike went to see him for something and had a good conversation with him in English!

Flamingos and the beach

Good Friday 22 April

We’ve had a good week in some respects, but every time we start what looks like a fairly straightforward maintenance job, we discover an underlying problem somewhere else in the works. However, we are plodding through it all with the end result that I think Forever will be better than she has ever been – even when we bought her.  Mike got started with sanding off the red poisonous paint on the hull – a shockingly hard job even with the electric sander whilst I got to work on a sail.

On Wednesday, we went to the market as usual and bought ourselves a two plate electric cooker for €30.  As our fee at the marina to live aboard includes all water and electricity it is foolish for us to use gas.  We also got Mike a nice new hat.

Surprisingly, all the service companies in the marina were open today and even my lady from the boulangerie came by.  Since France is a Catholic country I would have thought that Good Friday would be a holiday.  The weather was forecast hard southeast wind today with clouds and rain.  It started off quite sunny and not too windy so we took ourselves off on our bikes to the beach.  I had forgotten how far away the beach is, and the wind, of course, picked up as soon as we left.  It was a long hard slog into a miserable headwind and through acres of depressingly unattractive marshland, highlighted by a flock of lovely flamingos.

When we got to the beach, we were just about the only idiots there.  The only others were a few, very hardy, young men doing what I can only call parasurfing.  There is perhaps a proper name for this energetic sport but I don’t know it.  The beach is enormous - very deep and at least a mile long and with the wind blowing in from the sea, the surf was fierce and beautiful.  We could hear it pounding long before we could see it.  The parasurfers were having a ball.

We walked the full length of the beach, just enjoying being by the seaside.  Cycling back with the wind behind us was very pleasant indeed.