Stepping The Mast

Our main purpose at Port Napoleon was to have the mast and rigging re-stepped.

There were other jobs which we could also do, sorting out the calorifier again being on Mike's 'favourites' list!

Unfortunately when we went to the office they didn't seem to know anything about our mast, even though we told them that Nigel from Boatloads had delivered it, and we had confirmed this with Nigel.

Eventually we persuaded them to look where Nigel suggested and hey presto! our mast was found.....!

As it had been so well packaged, it took some time, underneath the sweltering sun to unpackage it.

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Port Napoleon was pleasant enough, the facilities were good and very clean. There was a decent small restaurant, but nowhere really great for spaniel walking. There was an area he could get into the water, and bark demandingly but walking was quite limited.

We decided to hire a car, as we were to be here for at least a week and it was a long walk to the beach along a not very pretty road, and it was very hot!

The car allowed Sprocket and I to go to the beach early, before the heat and other beach goers, and also meant we could easily access town for the supermarket, croissants, pain au chocolate etc.😂

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The beach here is great, it is vast and extremely clean and well kept. The views across the Golfe aren't the prettiest as they are quite industrial but all in all it was much better than we had been lead to be believed.

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The mast was scheduled to be stepped two days into our stay. It was a reasonable price though we probably hadn't appreciated how much of the rigging we would be doing ourselves, the price was literally just for the crane and its operator.

All was going swimmingly until we had the last two shrouds, we hadn't undone the turnbuckles enough.

As we were rushing to fix this issue, the mast operator, without telling us, let go of the mast...... mon dieu!!

Luckily Mike managed to stop the mast moving too much before the crane operator re-grabbed it, and we managed to finish fitting the rigging sufficiently for us to motor back around to our mooring.....

I, however, was convinced the whole thing was going to come crashing down at any time!

On return to our pontoon, our lovely Dutch neighbour lent us a Loos tensioning gauge in return for two beers. This helped us tension the rigging to perfection, giving others the impression that we actually knew what we were doing!

There was another UK couple opposite us who had come down through the canals the previous year and were now heading for Tunisia to overwinter, so it was great to meet up in the evenings and exchange stories, we had seen so few other cruisers on our trip down. Also we had time to catch up with various jobs, correspondence and family catch ups.

On this Zoom call the 'thumbs up' emoji kept popping in and out of our conversation for some unknown reason, so most of the call was spent trying to see if we could make it reappear on purpose! We've not had it happen again since then.

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The sails were retrieved, they had also come with Boatloads, and the lazy bag and lazy lines fitted. The lazy lines should have gone on without the need for anyone to go up the mast if we had taken them off correctly...

I guess something went wrong with that then......

The sails were new and the mainsail is a single line slab reefing design. The sails are high performance cruising laminate sails, and Mike is very excited about them. However, as the mainsail is so new it was a bit of a pain to get it all nicely stowed away in the lazy-bag when first dropped, we were hoping this would improve as our trip progressed.... it did thankfully!

We had a few goes at practising the reefing lines, and then redid them, and then redid them....

All the time it was very hot , there was no breeze and we had lots to do, but at least we could take the car and go to the beach for a cool down.

The days were long and we seemed to be busy all day before the sun went down, and finally we were done.

The auto-pilot and calorifier were fitted, the chart plotter was not, nor the solar panels.. but we calculated what we could live without and do at a later date. Ramukanji was keen to be out on the open sea!

At the end of the week it seemed that .finally our neighbours were slowly departing one by one.

The lovely Amel Santorin yacht with the lone Dutch sailor was off to moor in the Golfe de Fos before heading out to cross the Golfe de Lion and meeting friends in Spain. The British couple were heading east along the French coast before crossing to Corsica and then on to Tunisia, and the young couple from the Netherlands, who had not previously sailed and had bought an old Moody 36 decided that it was time for them to take the plunge and head out too... not sure if they knew where they were going!

Our plan was to do a relatively short first day with calm seas. Sprocket had not done a lot of sailing and we didn't want to stress him out too soon. He had been great on the inland waterways , but didn't like it too much when the boat wobbled, which obviously was going to happen more on the sea. We had also agreed that we wouldn't do any overnight sails and would try to keep the days relatively short for his better enjoyment.

This meant that we would not cut across the Gulf of Leon (fine by me! it is notoriously windy) and would hug the coastline along the Camargue.

To try to encourage visitors to this coastline, the French government had built many marinas in the seventies , each being 25-35 miles from the next. It didn't look overly interesting in the guide and we had not met many people who had done the trip, but we were decided that this would be what we would do. We would set off the next day, though the minimum distance was going to be at least six hours for the next marina.

Finally Ramukanji was back at sea 😊