Auntie Fouling to the Rescue

Dear Auntie Fouling

Spring is here and my bottom is a disaster!  There is so much advice out there about how to get it in shape - how do I know what’s right for me and my bottom? 

More specifically, I have just bought a 25-year old Catalina 25 lifting keel with, I would say, 25 years of bottom paint still clinging to the hull, judging by the layers of colors I’ve found so far. 

I know I have to scrape until I get all of the old paint off, but how do I know when to stop?  And then what?  Do I need to prep the surface or can I just slap the paint on?  And which paint?!  I’m tending towards the really expensive stuff because I want to do it right, but I’m just not sure what’s right for me. I also read that these bottom paints are toxic and that I should suit up for the Apocalypse. What’s up with THAT? And how many coats of paint should I use? And do I need to do something in between coats?  

Signed,

Bummed about my bottom

Dear Bummed,

If you ask 3 different people how they clean their bottom and apply bottom paint, you’ll get 5 different answers. Confusion is just part of the fun of being a boat owner and you must learn to embrace it.

Scraping your bottom:  yes and no.  (See how much fun this is going to be?)  Ideally, you should try to get as much of the old paint off as possible, but you must keep in mind that your goal is to have a smooth bottom.  If you’ve got pits and rough spots, those need to go.  Usually your epoxy layer is a white or cream color, and as far as I know, no one makes bottom paint that color, so stop when you strike white (or white-ish).  If getting down to the epoxy layer is a massive job, just aim for smooth.  Buy a quality scraper with replaceable cartridge blades. These babies cut through old paint like a hot knife through butter.  When you’ve got things as good as you can with the scraper, pull out your orbital sander and have a go at any uneven spots.

A note about safety:  Bottom paints are toxic to aquatic scum, and very bad for any of your soft tissues, specifically skin, eyes, lungs, etc.  One of the biggest dangers is from the fine dust while you’re sanding the old paint off the bottom.  Before we learned how to suit up properly, we suffered lung infections and eye infections from bottom paint dust and we hope you’ll learn from our mistakes. Tales abound of reckless people eschewing masks who ended up in the hospital for months with severe lung damage, so please take the warnings seriously. 

What's hot in boat-yard apparel for 2016.

When scraping and especially while sanding, cover your eyes, nose and mouth.  Those little filter-type masks with the metal nose clip and elastic bands are, in my humble opinion, good for NOTHING.  They’re hot and sweaty and have gaps in them and make you itchy and miserable.  The best method we’ve found is to take an old tee-shirt and pull it down over your head until it stops on the bridge of your nose and on your ears.  If the sleeves are long enough, tie them behind your head.  Bonus points if you take a magic marker and draw a big smile around the mouth area.  Friendly suggestion:  brush your teeth well before putting on any mask.  You’ll be mouth-breathing in close proximity to your own nose.  Trust me on this one.  For the eyes, use wrap-around eye protection that you can get from a hardware or garden store, not sun glasses with open sides.  When it comes time to paint, cover your skin to minimize contact with the fresh paint (plastic gloves, long sleeves, pants).  Don’t forget a bandana or cap for your hair.  If you have a choice, it’s good to do the painting on a breezy day when the fumes will be whisked away.  See also “Clean Up” below.   

Preparing to paint:  Now you have a smooth bottom and are ready to paint.  Wipe the bottom down with a damp rag to get rid of the dust. Tape off the zone to be painted around the water line.  Do NOT use masking tape.  Once it bakes in the sun it’s very difficult to get off.  Use the plasticky pvc-type tapes for this job found at any boat store.  Bottom paints need to be stirred well before you use them.  Use a stirring stick or paint mixer attachment for a drill and mix for several minutes.  You may need to remix every hour or so if you see any separation occurring.  Read the can for instructions for your particular paint.  Most paints will lose their anti-fouling properties if they are exposed to air for more than 3 weeks, so you should only start painting when you know the boat will go in the water within the time delay.

But wait !  Which paint ??:  This all depends on your bottom, what kind of sailing you do, where your boat is berthed, what kind of water it is in, what the last type of paint applied was, how well you removed (or didn’t) the last coat of paint, and how much money you have.  In general, if you are taking your boat out of the water and re-applying bottom paint every year (as you should), you do not need to do anything fancy.  There are two basic flavours:  hard matrix (modified epoxy paint) and ablative.  The biocide in the hard matrix gets leached out over time but the paint layer stays more or less intact.  It dries to a hard smooth(ish) surface that doesn’t wear off.  The ablative paint slowly wears away, exposing fresh biocide at a regular interval and the paint itself erodes with time as well.  If you sail a lot of miles or if your boat is berthed in an area with a strong current, an ablative paint will wear away quickly, but the advantage is that it’s easier to remove for the next season’s paint job.  The hard matrix will provide continual protection but eventually the biocide will be gone and you’ll just be left with paint and algae, and a bigger mess for the next season.

We have always used hard matrix.  For the way we sail, it lasts longer, it’s cheaper, and we scrape and repaint every year.  This year, however, we’re doing something different.  We’re heading into the Med and we’re not sure we’ll pull the boat out of the water or not for 18-24 months.  We need long-lasting protection.  The Jeanneau boatyard guys suggested the following one-two punch:  hard matrix as a first layer, then ablative as a second layer in a different color.  The ablative will slowly wear away to expose the hard matrix, which will then take over as the ablative fades.  With the color differences, we’ll be able to see the “wear” zones and can judge how quickly the ablative is ablating.

1st coat, hard matrix in grey.  Note red pvc tape at the water line.

Final coat, black ablative.

For you, Dear Bummed, I would suggest 1 good layer of hard matrix.  Your boat is berthed in brackish water in a river exposed to current, and you tend to haul out at least once per year anyway, so no need to go overboard (so to speak…) with fancy high-copper content paints.  Go for plain hard matrix.

Painting:  We like small rollers for applying an even layer.  Use cross-hatched passes to cover an area.  If you want to impress, you can finish the last pass of the roller in the direction of the water flow, which, in principle, may give you an additional 0.1 knot of speed. It’s a long boring job and you may as well amuse yourself.  Start painting the keel and the underside, then paint your way up and out to avoid getting paint on your hat or bandana when (not if) you bang your head. (Hey, you already look pretty silly with that tee-shirt pulled half-way down over your face – why not add an old bicycle helmet to the costume?)   

If you choose to do a 2^nd coat, read the can for instructions about drying times.  If you put the 2^nd coat on straight away, you can just put it on directly over the 1^st coat after it’s dry.  If you have to wait for a few weeks between coats, you will no longer have a chemical bond with the 1^st coat and will have to make a physical bond for the 2^nd coat, which simply means a quick pass with fine-grained sandpaper (HAZMAT clothes and mask again…).  You want to have a little bit of paint left over to cover the patches under the cradle or trailer that you can’t reach.  Do this just before the boat goes in the water – it doesn’t need much drying time.  If you’ve got quite a lot left over, take another pass along the water line, which is where most of the algae will build up.

Note: this should go without saying, but I’ve seen it happen.  Do NOT paint your anodes, folks.  Think about it. 

Change anode.  Do NOT paint it !

Clean up:  Take the tape off as soon as you finish your last coat.  Don’t let it stay on until the paint dries or you risk pulling off flakes.  Dispose of everything as directed on the can.  For any spills on the skin, you can use paint thinner (or gasoline) to wash it off, but hop in the shower as soon as possible and scrub down well (loofa, sponge) a couple of times to “detox”.  Don’t forget the inside of your ears.  That fine dust can find its way into the darndest places.  Rinse eyes as needed with water or a saline solution.  For your nose, netty pot, netty pot, netty pot. 

And now the most important part: no matter how careful you were with the mask, etc., your nasal passages and throat have probably been assaulted.  The best thing for you to do is to pour yourself a large icy gin and tonic.  The ice soothes, the bubbles dislodge any lingering particles, and the lime and gin disinfect. You may need several applications of this phase, but your health is no place to cut corners.     

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Harken Winch Maintenance

After our wildly popular Lewmar Wavegrip winch maintenance post from 2013 in our Spray days, I didn’t think I would even write a post about Mareda’s Harken 40.2 ST and 35.2 ST winches since, unlike the Wavegrip series, they are brand new and the documentation is easily available.

“What could possibly go wrong that might justify a few helpful hints?” we asked. 

On page 10 of the 40.2 ST manual, all goes well down to Step 10: Remove drum support No. 15.  The image as well as an on-line video show a hand simply lifting the drum support up and off.  We lifted.  We pulled.  We shoved.  We twisted.  We swore.  We pulled some more.  We finally called the boat yard technician who said sometimes new winches get a little stuck and that we should tap it with a hammer.  We tapped it with a hammer.  We tapped it to the left, we tapped it to the right, we tapped it to the side.  We tapped until we didn’t dare tap any further.  Today, the technician was on board for another problem, and we DEFIED him to get No. 15 drum support off the winch base. 

He looked over it carefully, positioned himself with knees slightly bent in front of the winch, then hauled back his arm and gave the top of the drum support a sharp karate strike with his palm.  The drum support popped right off. 

The moral of the story is that 1) you can trust the Harken instructions with an addendum or two, and 2) anything capable of lifting 850 kilos (or 1874 pounds) can take a little slapping around.  Go for it.

All went well down to the now-infamous Step 10...

REVISED Step 10: Remove drum support No. 15 (with forceful lateral karate strike...)

...which reveals dirty gears that need cleaning.

Clean the gears with diesel using Patrick's patent-pending bowl-in-a-bowl method.

Re-grease the gears with winch grease.

Use pure vaseline oil in the paws.

And have fun putting all these little slippery bits back together again !  (The Harken diagram and all those photos you took in the dismantling stage are helpful here.)

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Update 4: A Year of Reading the Med

This month’s reads were a mixed bag that left me rather depressed.  For the next round, I’m going to have to focus on countries and novels that don’t feature repressive regimes or war dramas.  I’m not sure I’ll be out of these woods anytime soon with countries like Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Montenegro still on my list. To take a break from the Med, I’ve recently plunged into the modern Chinese Classic Wild Swans by Jung Chang.  It features repressive regimes AND war dramas. Sigh.  

A reminder of my star system:

* = don’t bother

** = okay 

*** =  good 

**** = excellent !

EGYPT:  The Map of Love: A Novel by Ahdaf Soueif.  ***1/2

Short-listed for the 1999 Man Booker Prize.  A true historical fiction novel with equal doses of history and fiction.  The Map of Love (frankly, the novel deserves a better name…) weaves two multi-cultural love stories across time into the tapestry of Egyptian history from Turkish occupation and the Anglo-Egyptian war to 1998.  The story focuses on a young American woman and her Egyptian cousin who piece together the history of their grandmothers and great grandmothers (English and Egyptian) through letters and diaries while living through their own mixed-culture crises.  Through the letters, the story and Anglo-Egyptian history unfold in first-person narratives of several characters, and, in a few confusing bits that seem to have escaped a good editor, by an omniscient author. While the first-person accounts allow us to get to know several characters in depth, the shift in time and voice is often confusing. That said, the story is so engaging that we quickly forgive the annoyance of having to stop to make sure who is speaking.  There were generous doses of true history that other reviews have called “gently nationalist” or “sensitive”.  One of the reasons I embarked on this adventure of Reading the Med was to read Mediterranean authors, not western authors writing about Med countries, and so I greatly appreciated Soueif’s views.  However, the old novel-writing advice of “show, don’t tell” wasn’t always respected.  History should be woven in a living and transparent way into the story as much as possible; otherwise, you just end up with a group of characters sitting around the table discussing the ideas the author wants to get across.  While some important episodes of history (such as the Denshawai incident) are neatly treated, others are dealt with by having characters sit around a table and discuss points of view of history and culture.  It’s still interesting for readers (like me) who have very little background in Egyptian history, but it does make the novel feel a bit choppy and unconnected in spots.  But if you’re a reader like me, you’re not likely to go looking for Anglo-Egyptian history on your own or to stumble onto it accidently, so do yourself a favour and combine the enjoyable with the useful.  Read The Map of Love.      

SLOVENIA: That Night, I Saw Her by Drago Jancar. ***

Winner of France’s Best Foreign Book Prize 2014 written by one of Slovenia’s most popular authors.  This haunting mystery is a portrait of an enigmatic free-spirited young woman in the middle of a war whose refusal to accept the interpersonal changes that war imposes leads to her disappearance.  The backdrop, the Balkans of World-War II, plays an important role in the story, where friend and foe are brought together in close proximity, sometimes within the same family, and where allies and nazis and communists and partisans create a confusion of affiliations that makes it impossible to know who the good guys are. The author intentionally leaves the reader to flounder in this confusion, a confusion that our heroine rejects by treating people as individuals rather as members of a group. Too naïve to realize that she will not be judged with the same tolerance, her multiple affiliations lead to her disappearance. The author tells her story though the eyes of 5 witnesses, each of whom only knows a part of her story and the role they played in her final days.  It is a beautifully-crafted novel that exposes the tragedy and complexity of 20^th century Balkan history, and a story that has left me utterly depressed, but perhaps a bit more informed about the horrors of war away from the front lines.

SYRIA and LIBYA: The Future Arab: A Childhood in the Middle East (book 1: 1978-1984, book 2: 1984 – 1985) by Riad Sattouf. **1/2   Sattouf’s auto-biographical graphic novel about growing up blond in the Libya of Kadhafi and the Syria of Hafez Al-Assad was awarded the Prize for Best Album at the International Festival of Bande Dessinee in 2015, and was the 5^th most widely-translated French book of 2014.  These autobiographical graphic novels about growing up in a repressive society will remind you of the brilliant work of Marjane Satrapi of Persepolis fame.  It suffers in comparison, however, since it is neither laugh-out-loud nor particularly moving.  Sattouf was born to a Syrian father and French (Breton !) mother and these books recount his childhood growing up in countries trying to establish Arab socialist regimes. It is entertaining and educational in a way that sometimes only graphic novels can be… memorable but without feeling like you’ve been hit over the head with “a message.”  If you only want a light introduction to the culture, this may be a good choice.  But if you want something more poignant and profound from Libya, read Hisham Matar’s In the Country of Men (see Update 3).

And for heaven’s sake, after this round of depressing novels, go read Arto Paasilina’s The Year of the Hare.  This Finish feel-good masterpiece is a marvelous antidote to all these heavy dramas.

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Med Weather and Sailing Instructions Choices

Preparing for a cruise requires lots of information about ports (do they have space for visiting yachts?), anchorages (does this bay offer good protection?), and sailing instructions (e.g., keep 1 Mile offshore of this headland to avoid steep waves).  You also need radio channels and broadcast times for weather information and local security services.  It’s easy to go overboard (so to speak…) buying every nautical guide out there, but when you’re on a budget, choices must be made.  

Trying not to go overboard buying ALL the guides out there...

I’ve limited myself to the 2015 Bloc Marine Almanac (England to French / Spanish border), the IMRAY Guide for 2013 for Spain and Portugal, the 2014 IMRAY Guide for the Costa del Sol and Costa Blanca, and the 2016 Bloc Marine for the Mediterranean.  We've also added the Mediterranean Cruising Handbook and "Spanish for Cruisers" but those are more general (but VERY useful.)

It’s also easy to go overboard with weather information, sources, and equipment.  The VHF radio is mandatory and provides regional weather reports several times per day. But reports over large zones don’t always give you a very realistic picture of the weather where you are, especially in tricky areas around mountains or headlands.  NAVTEX and SSB radio seem to be on the way out, and most people tell me the equipment is finicky and that actually receiving the weather reports is hit-and-miss.  Satellite phones are all the rage, but they’re still too expensive for us (although coming down…love that sat-sleeve idea for cell phones).  We’re left with getting internet via wireless internet in ports and cell phone networks along the coast.  For Spain and Portugal, we haven’t quite decided whether we’ll sign up for a European-wide phone / internet contract before leaving France or if we’ll just buy a SIM card in Spain and Portugal and get a local phone / internet contract.  The cheapest international contract we’ve found is about 40 Euros / month for 5 GB of data outside of France, which seems a bit pricey.

Having internet aboard is critical for weather information when you’re at anchor and not in a port (or more likely, a nearby café or bar) where you can get wireless internet.  We have a number of favorite internet weather sites for coastal spots along the way, and for larger scale weather information, we use ZyGrib files.  For the Med, our Med-savvy friends have introduced us to a fabulous, free, and trustworthy high-rez grib service called Open Skiron, which provides grib files starting in Gibraltar and covers the entire Med.  (Note: these come zipped and are on the heavy side.)  I’ve been playing with these and I can import them into OpenCPN and MaxSea (although still haven’t tried this on the IPAD version…). 

And now, a treat for any of you who can read French: Last week, one of our local sailing gurus, Antoine Maury, introduced us to his friends Pierre and Martine Lavergne, who have spent the last 14 years sailing around the Med on their Sun Legend 41, Logos.  They have a blog that is an absolute GOLD MINE of information.  Enjoy !  http://pierre.lavergne1.free.fr/index2.php 

And on a final and completely unrelated note, I think I have convinced Patrick that we should invest the $16 needed to buy an anchor ball and motoring cone.  These are plastic visual signals that you hoist up to let other boats know when you are at anchor or when you are motoring.  I have always thought that the anchor ball idea was dumb unless you’ve had to anchor in an emergency someplace you shouldn’t be.  The motor cone, though, is useful.  Often, we keep the mainsail up even when we’re motoring (motor sailing).  But once your motor is turned on, you become a motor boat, not a sailboat, and lose the right-of-way.  Other boats, seeing your sail, may think you are under sail and treat you as a sailboat.  Both boats giving way at the same time can lead to problems. You can always pull out a pair of binoculars to see if the sailboat’s motor is pumping out water, but that’s not always possible in a tight spot or crowded area.  Of course, none of these arguments hold any sway with Patrick.  He was simply impressed by the tales of frequent controls by the Portuguese Coast Guard and the $400 fine for not having these $16 pieces of plastic aboard. Whatever works, right?

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Spring Cruising Preps

An anticyclone has been squatting over France for the last week, bringing sunshine and warm(ish) temperatures, and now the calendar tells me it’s spring.  In the span of a few days, we’ve gone from that dreamy fresh-out-of-hibernation state to near panic as we realize how much we have to do to prepare Mareda and ourselves for our Mediterranean adventure. 

A boat we chartered and sailed from Tunisia to Lampedusa, Malta, and Sicily.  This was our favorite anchorage in Gozo, Malta.

Preparing the Boat for the Med

In the summer, it’s going to be hot in the Med (yippee!):  bimini, window shades, wind scoops, small fan, mosquito nets, swim platform, water supply (All taken care of except for the wind scoops and repairing a latch on the swim platform.)

Sailing in shorts and tee-shirts !!  Unbelievable !

In the Med, winds can roll down the mountains and build up to gale force without much warning.  Anchor and chain need to be heavy enough and long enough to keep you securely fastened.  A secondary anchor needs to be ready to go, too.  (Need to splice the rode directly to the anchor chain to increase strength; Need to find a good way to have the 2^nd anchor and chain easily accessible from the cockpit.)

We also plan to anchor out often.  I’ve already mentioned the necessity for a strong anchor / chain system and a secondary system.  A flopper-stopper system to reduce rock-n-roll at anchor is also a necessity for a good night’s sleep in anchorages that get a lot of swell (which seems to be just about all of them along the Algarve and Costa del Sol sections of our voyage.) 

A sunny lunchtime anchorage in Tunisia.

In the Med, you often dock stern-to-quay.  We’ll need some more fenders, some longer sheets, and a gang-plank.  The drop-down swim platform is fabulous for stern-to moorings but the height difference or distance from the quay may not always be optimal.  A simple plank with holes in the corners for ropes is an easy(-ish) thing to pull together and is also useful for protecting your fenders if you have to lay alongside a rough cement quay.

I’ve rechecked the off-shore security material regulations and carried out an inventory of our existing material.  Need to buy 3 new hand flares.

Last but not least is getting the navigation taxes and insurance in order and getting Spanish translations of everything. 

Preparing the Navigation Plan

Basically, we'll head south until the butter melts and then turn left.  How hard could it be?

Gozo (I think) over my right shoulder.

But seriously, now...

I still like having paper charts aboard and a friend has graciously agreed to loan us his Med charts.  I suspect we’ll never look at them but their presence comforts me.  We now have 4 (!) nav systems aboard:  The B&G Zeus GPS / Chart Plotter running Navionics in the cockpit; a PC with GPS running MaxSea and OpenCPN, a backup PC with MaxSea and OpenCPN, and an IPAD Air II running MaxSea. 

I have the Mediterranean Cruising guide (Heikell 2012), the IMRAY Guide for Spain and Portugal (2013), and the IMRAY Guide for the Costas del Sol and Blanca (2014).  I still need to get the Bloc Marine Med Almanac for 2015/2016 to have the Colregs up to date.

Using these guides, advice from friends who sail in the area, and recent reports from other sailors on Noonsite, we’ve made a rough plan of our dates and ports and/or anchorages from Arzal to Alicante.  We believe FIRMLY that the most dangerous thing on a boat is a calendar, so we won’t be trying to keep to any set schedule.  We’re just going to follow our noses and look at the weather to decide when and where we go.  If we don’t get to Alicante by the time the bad weather sets in, we’ll just put down somewhere else.  In general, we plan to spend June sailing around Galicia, July sailing down the Portuguese coast, spend August along the Algarve to Gibraltar, and in September and October we’ll sail along the Costas del Sol and Blanca with initial plans to winter over in Torrevieja near Alicante.

Tunisia to Lampedusa, Beaufort 5 with choppy seas, and one HUGE helm.  Me in the background with grimace because of 2 freshly cracked ribs (remember "one hand for you, one hand for the boat?")

Preparing Ourselves

I just completed an inventory of our on-board pharmacy and compared it to the checklist in our French offshore sailing regulations.  I have a few items that need to be replaced and will got to the doctor next week for those items requiring a prescription.  We’ve both got dentist and dermatologist appointments in the next few weeks, too.

We have to prepare the house to be abandoned for 6-7 months.  This mostly involves weed control and buttering up our neighbours.  (We are VERY lucky to have neighbours who have become dear friends.) 

Mentally, I think we’re both in great shape and ready to go.  We will have a 1.5-month shakedown period with Mareda before we head across the Bay of Biscay to Spain.  All the reading and talking with more experienced Med sailors has given us a good idea of what to expect (I hope !).  It’s always reassuring to reduce the unknown to manageable proportions.  Here’s what we expect:

• A wee bit of stress (but the good kind, right?!) 
• Some charming villages, towns and cities (Galicia region, Porto, Lisbon, the Algarve, Cadix, Gibraltar, etc.).
• Some not-so-charming areas (large industrial ports, over-built coastlines).
• Chilly temps and fog around northern Spain; warm weather south of Lisbon
• Many fishing boats and their unmarked / poorly marked nets and pots
• Many fish / shellfish farms to dodge
• Poor internet reception; lots of time spent in cafés and bars trying to get a weather report
• Getting proficient at Med-style moorings (stern-to-quay) (see “stress” above)
• Learning to cope with rolly, lumpy anchorages exposed to swell
• Early starts and lots of motor-sailing to reach the next port before the stiff afternoon breezes set in (or more hopefully, maximizing the use of our Gennaker that allows us to sail in as little as 7 knots of wind)
• Covering shorter distances than planned to avoid long hours of motoring, followed by longer distances than planned when the weather becomes favorable
• Some beautiful anchorages with water warm enough to swim in without a wet suit
• Improving our fishing skills (e.g., anything other than mackerel…).
• Meeting other cruisers along the way (always one of the highlights of any cruise)
• Hot weather in July and August; learning to maximize interior comfort and minimize interior mosquitoes and no-seeums
• A mix of very expensive ports, some reasonably-priced ports, and lots of anchorages to keep overall prices down.

Like most things, urchins are okay with lots of butter and garlic.

And now, it’s off to the ship chandlers and then to the boat yard to see about that new battery…and flares, and anchor rode splice, and…

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Saved by Stickers

It’s been awhile since I’ve written a whiny existential post, so before spring is upon us and sailing preparations get seriously underway and obliterate the dead time in which existential crises breed, here it is.  This winter’s crisis began with what should have been a joyful occasion: buying a new laptop computer.  The photo theme accompanying this crisis is “pathways.”

Volubilis, Morocco.

The problem is a simple one.  French keyboards are not the same as English (or American) keyboards.  Of course the French slip in some funny characters (é à ô á è ç) but even the normal letters don’t have the same placement.  A French keyboard is called an AZERTY keyboard because those are the 6 letters on the top left hand of the keyboard, whereas English / American keyboards are QWERTYs.  You can special order a QWERTY keyboard laptop from France, but it costs about $200 more.     

Biking trail along the canals, France.

Patrick offered what he thought was a simple suggestion: just get used to an AZERTY keyboard.  It made sense.  In a few short years I will have spent more than half my life in France  anyway.  Maybe it’s time to let go.  But when I actually thought of re-learning to type, I broke down in tears.  For short emails or facebook posts, I sometimes use Patrick’s French computer to peck out a message, but for someone who used to touch-type 60 words per minute, it’s a real setback.  It’s not the process of learning to type again that frustrates and depresses me, it’s the loss of one of the last links I have to my mother tongue. 

Dades Gorge, Morocco.

Except for skyping with my parents and a few friends a couple times per week, my only English interaction is reading and writing (and I read about 1/3^rd of the time in French already).  If writing now has to be done through a French veil, I’ll lose a small part of what’s left.  I’m fluent in French (although that doesn’t mean I don’t make mistakes) but even if I live here for the rest of my life and even if I speak French 99% of the time, it will always be a second language. Maybe others manage, but I can’t always express myself the way I want in French, or at least not as well as I would in English.  The searching for words, the hesitancy, the “foreignness” of it all is like watching a film in black and white instead of in colour, or like cooking with only salt and pepper instead of a spice-rack full of options.

Hiking trail, Guadeloupe.

My first French teacher was a French woman living in Woods Hold Massachusetts where her husband worked at the Oceanographic Institution where I was a graduate student. We would meet for lessons in her beautiful home, working at the sunny kitchen table overlooking her “French” country garden.  One day, she held my hand in hers and told me that if I made my life in France, I would never feel truly at home anywhere in the World ever again. She knew what she was talking about. With the passing years, the foreign becomes familiar and home becomes a stranger.      

After wrestling with all these demons for a couple of days, I told Patrick that I absolutely could not accept an AZERTY keyboard.  I would make do with my  7-year old Sony VAIO running Vista Business until it just wasn’t possible anymore.  He was frustrated and I felt like a pouty child throwing a tantrum, but I’m just not able to let go of this small part of my culture just yet.

Colza field, France.

And then I turned to the internet to tap into the hive-mind of Anglo-Saxon expats in France to find out if others had gone over to the dark side (okay, we’ll call it “the other side”) and how they managed. 

Tizi n Test pass, Morocco.

Stickers.  Stickers was the answer.  Any recent computer can change its keyboard input to any other language. The only problem is that you have to know the keyboard by heart because, while the computer can speak numerous languages, it can’t do anything about the letters physically printed on the keyboard.  Several companies make stickers that you can use to convert your keyboard to a QWERTY.  The fancy ones are even transparent so that you can see the original keyboard markings as well as the QWERTY ones in a different colour.

Desert road, Morocco.

This solution, besides being simple and elegant, has many parallels with my life in France. My language is now a sometimes-confusing sometimes-frustrating mix of French and English. Yes, I do need to more fully embrace my adopted homeland and its crazy language, but I have so little to cling to that is still my own that giving up even a small part of my mother tongue just isn’t possible for me right now. 

So like dogs and their masters, my keyboard and I are destined to look like each other, both a mad Frenglish melange, neither fully French nor fully English and never really at home anywhere.

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Update 3: A Year of Reading the Med

I've created a new category "Reading the Med" if you would like to find the earlier updates and beginning of this project.  Update 3 includes two fantastic finds and a confession.

LIBYA:  In the Country of Men by Hisham Matar ****

A first novel, nominated for the 2006 Man Booker prize and winner of the 2007 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje prize.  This haunting story is one that will stay with me for a long time.  We see 1979 revolutionary Libya through the eyes of a 9-year old boy, whose father is taken away and tortured for subversive activities. Initially I dreaded reading this book, as I supposed it would be fairly predictable, bitter and sentimental.  But instead of focusing on the plight of the dissidents of the revolution, Matar tells the story of the family and friends caught in the cross-fire, where loyalties are tested and broken, cowardice is defined and redefined, and, because several of the main characters don’t act the way we want them to, the reader is forced to question how he/she would respond under the same pressures. As endearing as our boy narrator is, he is far from the noble stoic hero we want, manipulated by the regime and a victim of his own innocence, frustrations, and prejudices.  Several scenes are so chilling that I was not able to read more than a few pages at a time, but the often light-hearted recollections of childhood – even this childhood –  save the novel from becoming too dark. The writing is beautiful with strong sense-of-place and richly-defined characters.  The plot is well paced and the novel never bogs down in heavy-handed reflection.  Highly recommended.

TURKEY: The Bastard of Istanbul by Elif Shafak ***1/2

Foreword: I am a huge fan of Turkish literature.  You may have expected me to review the works of Nobel prize-winning Orham Pamuk (whom I ADORE) or one of my all-time favourites, The Time Regulation Institute by Ahmed Hamdi Tanpinar, or even Birds without Wings by Louis de Bernieres, not a Turkish author but author of an exceptional novel about the heartbreaking birth of the Turkish nation.  A few months ago, I was watching a (fantastic) tv show called “The Europe of Writers” where the featured country was Turkey.  Pamuk was featured, but I was also introduced to Sema Kaygusuz (whom I have yet to read) and Elif Shafak, Turkey’s most widely-read author and a fascinating character in her own right.  For Christmas, some good friends offered me Shafak’s The Bastard of Istanbul.

In 2006, this book earned its best-selling author a condemnation by the Turkish authorities for insulting the national identity, carrying with it a 3-year prison sentence. She was eventually acquitted. The Bastard of Istanbul addresses the delicate issue of the contested Armenian genocide and does a brilliant job of presenting the complexity of history and its interpretation by its victims’ descendents almost 100 years later. The story revolves around the friendship of two young women, one Armenian-American and the other Turk, who together walk the razor’s edge between amnesia and debilitating memory to try to understand how to (if possible) erase the past and move forward from the atrocities of their shared history.  In the midst of this deliberation, the author presents us with a metaphor for the Armenian-Turkish rift in the form of dark and unspeakable family secrets.  Initially a bit annoyed by this tactic, I agreed to go along with it to see how the metaphor played out, hoping it would provide some insight into the author’s thoughts on the Turkish dilemma.  I’m very glad I did.  At first, the response left me perplexed, and that has made me appreciate the book all the more. With reflection, the parallels offered by the author become clearer: heinous crimes committed by youth and the moral obligation to punish those crimes at the expense of spoiling a glorious past and destroying a whole family. To try to move forward building ever higher on an artificial foundation can only lead to disaster and collapse.  Clearer, but not yet clear.  What good is punishment without public recognition of wrong-doing?  Is assisted suicide still suicide? This is a tale that gives the reader a lot to think about after the last page has been consumed (after which you will certainly go back and re-read some critical passages to make sure you really understood what just happened…). This is a historical fiction novel that is essential reading to understand the beginnings of an impasse that still plagues us today.  As an added bonus, it is a joy to read, and, strangely, hysterically funny in parts.    

And a CONFESSION:  I have been cheating on the Mediterranean with other non-Mediterranean countries.  It just happened.  But I’d be lying if I said that it was meaningless or that it won’t happen again.

MEXICO: Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Paramo (***)

SOUTH AFRICA:  J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (****)  

FINLAND: I have just started Arto Paasilinna’s “Le Cantique de l’Apocalypse Joyeuse” with the english title, “The Best Village in the World.”

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Quiberon's Wild Coast, Unchained

The first big storm of winter hit southern Brittany today with recorded gusts of 146 km / hr (91 mph, 79 knots!).  Patrick and I ventured out to the Wild Coast (Cote Sauvage) near our home to watch the spectacle.  We waited till the wind was a more manageable 75 km / hr (40 knots), but taking photos was still difficult - impossible to steady the camera and sea foam blowing everywhere. We're very happy Mareda is safely tucked away on her cradle (facing the wind !).

Grib files showing 40 knots sustained winds for the next 24 hours or so...

Sea foam plasters the rocks and flies through the air

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In the Cradle

We pulled Mareda out of the water yesterday for 3 months of drying out on a tall cradle designed for lifting keels.  We were surprised at how clean the bottom was after 7 months in the water, and there were only a few spots where the paint showed signs of “close encounters”, mostly on the underside of the keel.

I was also reminded of an important fact of underwater optics:  dive masks magnify things underwater.  Several months ago, the keel hit the tidal gate leaving Guernsey in the English Channel Islands.  The tidal gate has 2 meters of water over it when the traffic light turns green.  I saw green lights, and conditioned to believe that green means go, we headed out.  “Bonk !” went the not-so-gentle reminded that our draft is 2.25 not 2 meters.  Apparently, sometimes green means maybe.  The keel did what it was designed to do; it just lifted up and slid over the barrier and then dropped back down into place.  Later I dove down to look at the damage and reported an impressive golf-ball sized chunk missing from the leading edge of the swing keel.  Now that we can see the damage with our own eyes and without the magnifying effect of the dive mask, the real damage is only about thumb-sized.  Nice surprise!  

The mechanic came over and winterized the motor and our only nasty surprise was a huge crack in one of the blades of the water pump impeller.  If it had disintegrated, the bits could have blocked the cooling system and caused lots of trouble. The impeller was new 6 months ago and we only had about 160 hours of motoring this season.  A bit disturbing.

After a good scrub of the hull with the high-pressure hose, we’re ready to leave Mareda high and dry until mid April.  In the meantime, I’m studying the charts, pilot books and blogs to plan our cruise around the Iberian peninsula, through Gibraltar and into the Med.  It’s going to be challenging (fog, fishing nets and pots, tiny fishing ports with few facilities, nice but very expensive ports, interesting mooring situations, capricious weather, language barriers, etc.) but we’re eager for the adventure to begin! 

Addendum:  forgot to mention that I got the chance to try out the emergency rope ladder in the transom yesterday.  Since our cradle is really high to allow the lifting keel to almost fully descend, our ladder was just a tad short so I used the emergency rope ladder to climb the rest of the way up.  I learned 3 things during this exercise: 1) I hope I never have to use it in an emergency, 2) I really need to work on my upper body strength, and 3) we absolutely need to have a robust block-and-tackle system that we can attach to the arch to help haul up someone who has fallen overboard.  We do have 2 small tackles on the arch to haul up the dinghy but I doubt those would be strong enough to do the job of hauling up a wet crew member (or skipper !).  

And now, off to find some snow…

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Update 2: A Year of Reading the Med

Update 1 of this adventure highlighted some real gems of Mediterranean literature.  Round 2, however, was more of a mixed bag, which is a polite way of saying I slogged through some stinkers so that you don't have to. 

ISRAEL: A Pigeon and a Boy by Meir Shalev  ** ½

Winner of the Brenner Prize (Israel) and several other European awards from an internationally-acclaimed author.  With all due respect to the author and to the literary establishment that heaped glowing reviews onto this book, I need to tell you from the get-go that it’s going to be hard for me to describe this book without sniggering.  I do agree with one professional reviewer who call the book “unforgettable”.  Spoiler alert in effect as from this point.  Yair is a short dark muscular boy born into a tall blonde family, and we suspect something is amiss from the beginning.  Written from the view point of Yair as an adult in the throes of his own marital turmoil, our attention is focused on the story of a pigeon handler during Israel’s war of independence, who is (queue menacing music… dah! dah! dah!) a short dark muscular boy.  All that remains is to figure out how his mother met the pigeon boy, and what could be more straightforward than a pigeon boy meeting (drum roll, cymbal clash and pregnant pause…) a pigeon girl!  The pigeon boy decides they will not have sex before he goes off to war because of his belief that he would not return alive if they did.  But hang on a minute … we know from the beginning of the story that the pigeon boy dies in battle, torn to shreds by snipers’ bullets.  How could the boy possibly be Yair’s father, you wonder?  Well you have clearly forgotten about the pigeons, my friends.  As the boy lies dying alone in a small monastery, he manages to… well, er, uh… expel and collect his sperm in a small glass vial that he attaches to the leg of his champion carrier pigeon.  The pigeon manages to lift off with its precious burden and flies bravely between whizzing bullets to the pigeon girl at the zoo, who understands immediately that the bird’s return means that a) the pigeon boy is dead and b) that the vial contains his sperm.  (As an aside, does this remind anyone else of the Monty Python sketch, “what is the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow?”) Scrambling madly through the zoo lab in search for a spoon and a syringe, she flops on her back and inseminates herself.  The rest of the story unfolds with relative ease.  It’s too bad, really, since the book is otherwise well written, the story lines are interesting, and the characters are vibrant and engaging.  I had intended to give it a 3-star rating up until this (dare-I-say-it?) seminal moment in the story.  Alas, after such revelations, I found it hard to take seriously anymore. 

LEBANON: An Unnecessary Woman by Rabih Alameddine  **

Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and National Book Award.  The story flows from the memories of 70-year-old Aaliya, an endearing feisty blue-haired heroine who dared to live a modern and independent life in the constrictive society of 1970s civil-war Lebanon.  Her salvation from both the war and the society that condemns her lifestyle is literature.  The novel combines all the ingredients needed to create an appealing story for modern women and lovers of literature and history; me, me, and me.  But I didn’t love it.  After a beautiful start (and I recommended it enthusiastically to a few friends after a promising first quarter), the book gets bogged down in Aaliya’s literary reviews and ponderings to the point that the plot disappears completely and we feel like we’ve accidentally wandered into an academic treatise where the author tries to dazzle us with the breadth and depth of her knowledge.  Towards the end it was simply a painful slog to finish. 

MEDITERRANEAN overview: On the Shores of the Mediterranean by Eric Newby ***

Fans of travel literature should feel their hearts skip a beat with excitement when they see the name Eric Newby, author of the classic works A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush and The Last Grain Race.  Newby sailed a 4-masted schooner from the UK to Australia in 1938, climbed the Nuristan mountains of Afghanistan, was a prisoner of war, escaped from his concentration camp and was recaptured, returned later to marry the Slovenian woman who hid him during his escape, and spent some years working with his father in a women’s high-fashion business.  For most of his career, when he wasn’t traveling himself, he served as travel editor of The Observer.  With such credentials, it’s impossible not to be enthralled by his sometimes hysterical recollections of traveling around the Mediterranean basin, clockwise from Naples, in the 1980s.  In the acknowledgements in the front of the book, Newby thanks Colonel Muammar Kaddafi for hosting them during their jaunt through Libya.  While some passages are dry and dip too deeply into the historical landscape for my tastes, the book as a whole is a fantastic read and is an essential companion to the fiction from each country that I’ve been reading.

MEDITERRANEAN overviews, continued:  The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean by John Julius Norwich ****, and The Pillars of Hercules *1/2  by Paul Theroux.

The Middle Sea is essential reading, the bible of all things Mediterranean, and despite the comprehensive historical coverage, very engaging and readable.  After reading Norwich and Newby, The Pillars of Hercules by Theroux struck me as the personal ramblings of an often poorly-informed traveler content to offer up summaries of a place based on meeting a few local characters in a bar.  His goal is to write a book and cover as much ground as possible as quickly as possible.  Perhaps this approach is meant to offer a snapshot in time and many critics loved the book.  I found it annoying and didn’t learn anything useful or interesting about the Med from it.  It’s all about him and his insights. Pass.

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