Rope Admiral Judi -alias Madame Butterfly-helps Little Darwin regular contributor Peter Burleigh spread his wings .
Part 1: A Surfeit of Character
Among my earliest childhood memories is my father’s regular and scornful insistence that “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”, meaning the only way a boy could build a level of acceptable moral fibre was to face death or dismemberment several times a week. Over several decades I added marriage, disease and over-confidence to the “what doesn’t actually kill you” list until I was sure that character was oozing from every orifice. However, this year I have taken on a challenge which includes all five character-building elements. It’s pushing me to the extreme #10 ranking on the Boris Karloff scale of Stoic Manliness.
Earlier this year we bought a live-aboard cruiser in the UK, intending to get it to France and cruise the canals to a town south of Dijon in seven weeks. My superior officer and partner in this odyssey is my trusty mate Judi, who holds the rank of “Rope Admiral”. I am the titular captain but we both know where the real authority lies. Her coolness in the face of typical onboard galactic catastrophes goes far beyond my own.
There are dozens of boat types out there, several choices of hull material and an infinite number of layouts and inclusions. It’s easy to spend your childrens’ inheritance, but harder to make the right decision of what’s right for you. Overwhelmed, we turned to four basic criteria:
•Did we want a sail boat or a power boat?
•Would we cross oceans or stick to the coasts and inland waterways?
•How many toilets do we want?
•Do we want a washing machine?
•Do we want to spend our treasure to buy a boat or should we rent when we need one?
Years before we had bought a Dutch canal cruiser named “De Laak” and a witty Frenchman dubbed Judi "la Dame du Lac" or "Lady of the Lake". Our new purchase is also Dutch, named “De Vlinder” (The Butterfly) so it follows that Judi will be called "Madame Papillon"’("Madame Butterfly").
By 2012 my refusal to accept any form of self-denial had blunted my father’s saying to “whatever I kill and eat makes me stronger”, so the decision to put the boat on a truck at its Berkshire marina and send it by road to a marina an hour west of Paris was an easy one. To cross the Channel through international waters meant suffering endless rules and regulations, and required qualifications in everything from operating a chart plotter to evading schools of ferries and freighters which crowd the world’s busiest sea lanes. The real horror was the prospect of dealing with the UK, French and EU bureaucracies at the same time.
An internet search revealed a marina near Poissy with a crane big enough to lift the boat off the truck and launch it directly into the Seine. De Vlinder weighs around 14 tonnes so she’s no tinny. Complete with a rear deck, a swimming platform with an outdoor shower, a saloon with satellite TV and a curved staircase, a kitchen, a dinette, two refrigerators, a bow cabin with bathroom and a stern cabin with shower and bathroom, The Butterfly is a beautiful thing. It looks and feels unused, although built in 2006. We flogged Google for 12 months before we found it, we negotiated for another 6 months and finally, another 12 months later, here we are. During those last months we kept scouring the net looking for similar boats, hoping we hadn’t paid too much. We hadn’t.
We leave the UK by below-Channel train on the same Monday the boat is driven away on the truck to cross above-Channel, and we were scheduled to meet up in France at 9.00am Tuesday at Detroit Marine at Vieux-sur-Seine. Why Tuesday? One of the quirks of French business is that many are closed on Mondays for no apparent reason.
Being both Samaritan and good, some friends have promised to meet us in their own boat. They are here, but our boat isn’t. Detroit is the name 18th century French settler Antoine de La Mothe Cadillac gave to the river, and to the town which didn’t became the capital of the US state of Michigan. Lansing did. “Detroit” also means Strait, so make of this what we could, it still didn’t explain why the boat hasn’t arrived at Detroit Marine by four that afternoon.
England assures us by phone that the boat will arrive the next day. At Dover, the first ferry port the truck went to, the bottom of the trailer was too low to get up the ramp, so it had to detour to Folkstone, and there the boat was too wide to get on the ferry.... so they detoured even further south to Newhaven before it could get over the channel to Dieppe, an arrival port far south of the truck’s original destination, Calais. Luckily we can stay aboard our friends’ boat.
The next morning the truck driver reports that he’s caught in a 10-km traffic jam. He’s crawling through narrow village streets and contributing to the chaos by barely missing the power lines, intimidating oncoming traffic and scaring small children. Apparently the police aren’t helping.
Boats are very costly and therefore held in high nervous regard if they’re endangered, and at this rate ours could be destroyed and recycled into hairpins before it touches the water. This supports one of the traditional arguments against buying a boat (flushing money down a toilet), but if you must buy one make sure you never move it from its mooring. That way your investment isn’t threatened, nor is your life.
When the truck does arrive four hours later it’s preceded by a little Renault van topped with a flashing yellow light and a‘Convoi Exceptionel’ sign, the present-day equivalent of a man with a red flag walking in front of your car. The boat, its trailer and its prime mover is a gigantic assemblage which turns down the steeply-sloping driveway of the Detroit Marina and instantly gets stuck on the footpath. There’s a resonant chorus of “merde!” from the assembled rubber-neckers and the sound of clenching teeth from Judi and me. Strangers try to cheer us up. The girl from the Marina office advises “Restez Zen!” which is OK for a Buddhist monk but not people whose boat is about to be smashed like a cheap toy.
The street is blocked and so is the entrance to the marina. French people pour from nearby houses and the backed-up cars to form committees to discuss the problem. In response to the outpouring of gratuitous advice there is a shaking of heads, shrugging and pouting. They try everything from brute force applied by a tractor to rudimentary tyre ramps made from packing crates. When it all does eventually move I reckon it’s the quality of my own swearing that’s given it impetus.
At the bottom of the hill a spider-like machine on four long legs straddles the boat as if it plans to reproduce with it – but no, it lifts the boat off the trailer and the truck extricates the trailer. The driver hands me a pen and an official form to sign. “That’s it mate; once it ain’t touchin’ the trailer no more, everything that happens to the boat is your lookout.” His bedside manner stinks. “Gotta be somewhere in Holland tonight to pick up a boat,” he says, and vanishes along with his truck. We look at the debris and rusting hulks around Detroit Marine and are discouraged by its similarity to a scrapyard.
The spider machine’s engine coughs and belches and chuffs its ungainly body towards the bank of the Seine carrying our precious boat between its legs. The keel swings only 50 millimetres above the ground. There is a rusty launching gantry at the water’s edge, overgrown with weeds, that I previously assumed is unserviceable. The spider driver seems unconcerned; he chugs along confidently. The wheeled spider legs run out along the suspended gantry tracks on each side and the boat is to be lowered into the river, unshackled and then released into the wild. The Seine has heavy barge traffic this close to Paris and the blunt-nosed monsters shunt huge bow-waves at us. To avoid severe damage we lower inflated fenders all around our boat so they will take the impact between boat and gantry. We tie her up and keep her safe but can’t stay here, it’s too hazardous.
I presume this is the “what doesn’t kill you...” part of my father’s philosophy. He loved the idea that a pessimist is simply a well-informed optimist, but he went straight to pessimism. His working life was spent in a Bank which demanded optimism in all things except you could be fired for not displaying relentless pessimism about everything. No wonder I was confused.
Our friends’ help us assemble the glass windscreen, the radar arch and the canvas canopy over the steering position, test the instruments and open the map. Suddenly we’re battered by drops of rain as big as sparrows with their wings amputated. We can’t stop putting up the covers or the boat will soon be a swimming pool. Our shoes are full of water. Heavy gusts push De Vlinder against the steel gantry. Sandwiched between the two our fenders flex in and out against the metal like they’re panting in fear. The next test is to start the engine, the one after that to get the boat away from the steel structure that the wind is determined to crush us against...
We are forty minutes from Paris by suburban train but three days away by river, not least because we are going against the current. Fuelled by elation and Mumm champagne we delight in the way time slows down on the water. The high-voltage stress of surviving the last few hours, the constant decision-making in unfamiliar hazard fades away. The pressure is off and all seems well. We have time to study the river. It’s built up of course but far more attractive than we expected; nearly all the factories and industrial areas have been swept away. Riverside land apparently is too expensive to be used for much else than residences or offices.
Trees line the banks. Ducks, which are the rabbits of the waterways, rut in the shallows under overhanging branches. One of our overnight stops is at Port Van Gogh. Bad amputation jokes fall on deaf ears. The outlying urban sprawl finally gives way to the Isle de France, the historical centre which defines the character of Paris. It’s laid out in a spiral like a halved Nautilus shell with twenty compartments. Live outside these twenty arrondissements and you can’t claim you’re Parisienne.
We head for the enclosed harbour at Arsenal, which has the Bastille Metro station at one end. En route we pass many of the monuments Napoleon built to aggrandise himself. Just past Notre Dame Cathedral we kind-of knock on a door in the bank of the Seine and they let us into a concealed lock. For your money they provide showers, toilets, maps, gardens to relax in, shore power, water. There’s a supermarket close by where you can sweep shelves-full of French wine into your ‘chariot’ (shopping trolley to you). At sixty Euros a night this is the bargain of bargains – especially when even a cheap and nasty hotel room in Paris will set you back a hundred Euros. Your other option is to sleep in a cardboard box under one of the Seine bridges but you may not care for your neighbours or their bodily fluids.
Yes, this is more like it. More Champagne and pate, please. The boat has performed smoothly. The newly-installed washing machine doesn’t shake the boat too much during its spin cycle. Judi is happy – the clothesline is constantly full. The electric toilets grind away cheerfully. Son Marc, visiting from his workplace in sunny, carefree Teheran invites hordes of Parisian friends. The boat absorbs them comfortably.
After a day or two, reality calls. We are committed to be back in Paris on the 17th of August for our flight to Australia. Today is the 23rd of July. There are 425 kilometres to be navigated and 214 locks we must pass through. A lock is a stone-walled shoebox barely wide enough to fit the boat in, manned by lazy lock keepers who are militant anarchists. Still, why worry? What could go wrong?
It is time to leave, but there is an unanswered question hanging over us, which is just how much French Champagne can an Australian drink? Judi is willing to find out, especially as our dollar is strong at the moment, but time is shortening and her liver is rebelling. Our route is clear: we cruise further up the Seine for a few days, turn to Port (or left, in lubber-speak) into the Yonne River for a week, then into the Burgundy Canal. In about three weeks we should get to a little town named St Jean de Losne where the canal meets the Soane River. There we’ll have the boat lifted out of the water, placed in a secure yard, covered and winterised against the freezing weather to come.
