Belgium to St. Nazaire by motorbike

EDIT:  Bloggers editing interface is fucked up (AGAIN!), so all the pictures have to be at the top of the post.  I guess you can figure out what's what.

 Here's a fun job description: Procure two 125cc off-road bikes and bring them to the Daphne. Bart, being the speaker of the local language, got on the internet and promptly found two Honda Varadero 125s in good condition. The only slight "problem" was that they were both in Belgium, which meant that there was suddenly a sizable road trip on my calendar. I set off at six o'clock Wednesday morning, and subsequently spent twelve hours in the public transportation system, finally arriving in a small village close to Mechelen to survey the first bike.

All was well, so Bart (who had joined me at that point) and myself set off yet again for another little village, the name of which has escaped my memory, to have a look at the second bike. At that time I was getting well and truly tired of sitting on the train, a tedious exercise only interrupted by the odd railway station. Luckily, the Belgians haven't succumbed to the malady of reconstructing all their old railway stations in glass and concrete, as is the fashion in Norway, so at least there was some interesting architecture to break up the boredom. I especially liked the one in Antwerp, with four sets of tracks stacked vertically either side of a spectacular central gallery, all capped off by a lattice girder roof fit to put the Eiffel tower to shame. They sure don't build 'em like they used to!

When both bikes were finally bought and paid for, it was high time to get to bed. I spent Thursday making a trip to Oostende (which I'd never thought I'd see again), where Bart met me with the paperwork for the registration and insurance. Thanks, dude, without local support I'd have been helpless in the grasp of bureaucracy. While in town, I also paid Ludvig the engineer for the radar parts we need (the old Decca has fried its power supply board). Even though I started out at six o'clock the next morning to get my hands on the number plate for "my" bike, it was five in the afternoon before I finally disentangled myself from Brussels and started making serous headway for St Nazaire.

It quickly turned out that I'd badly misjudged the ambient temperature at night. Except for a helmet and gloves, I totally lacked proper motorcycle gear, riding in jeans and my trusty leather coat. I'd initially been a bit worried about getting too tired during the projected 12 hours of riding, but as the sun went down and the air temperature dropped to five degrees, lack of sleep was my least concern. I cut the ankles off a pair of socks from my backpack and put them around my wrists to lessen the amount of wind blowing up my sleeves, put on my dirty T-shirt for an extra layer and tucked my pants into my socks. Still, it only helped so much, and I was shaking so bad that the bike took a zig-zag line down the road. When I finally stopped being bothered by the cold and started entering the don't-give-a-fuck state, I realized that I was being irresponsibly stupid, and put up for the night in a B&B in Longeau, close to Amiens.

At that point I must have mad a serious dent in my core temperature, because when I woke up at six the next morning, I was still feeling cold and my legs didn't really work well. I jumped on the bike and kept going south-west, stopping for coffee at every service station, trying to preserve some heat. Still, the chill was absolutely brutal, so that when the sun got up and started heating the landscape, it was like the most wonderful gift I'd received in ages. The Varadero has the best chassis of any 125 I've ridden, but it's also by far the slowest, and really doesn't like to go faster than 100 km/h. Thus, I stayed off the highways, following the N- and D-roads, an ever widening grin inside my helmet as I finally started feeling at ease.

Even with the stopover, the trip to St. Nazaire made for a long day of riding. Sadly, I was a bit too preoccupied with making good on my goal to really enjoy the beautiful countryside rolling by, and it was with relief that I finally put the bike on its stand next to Daphne, thoroughly plastered with bug spatter. This morning, the sun rose into a deep blue sky on my beautiful Sunday, and since the trip from Belgium had been such hard riding, I decided to make a little trip purely for the pleasure of riding. The Varadero really is a fantastic little bike, and aside from the all too obvious lack of power, it feels like a much bigger machine. Not only did it keep me semi comfortable for the run down from Belgium, but it eats up bad roads with all the competence I've come to expect from a Honda off-roader. I picked a route around the marshes north of town, sticking to the smallest roads I could find, and took it easy all the way. I even took the time to stop for pictures, a small selection of which you'll find below:

More on the GPS malfunctions - Help wanted!

As previously mentioned, we've experienced two GPS failures in the past few weeks.  I've been trying to google the issue today, with little luck.  There is a lot of chatter about different sources of GPS signal disturbances, and it seems to be picking up the pace, but there's nothing specific relating to our region.  Here's a detailed description of the problem:

We have three GPS systems on board.  They are all completely separate, from the power supply through to the antenna.  The signal loss occurs suddenly and simultaneously on all three devices.  The signal strenght drops to zero for all sattelites, and the units lose their fix.  The first incident (off the Brittany coast) lasted for about ten minutes, the second (in the northern part of the bay of Biscaya) approximately twenty minutes.  During the second incident, we were out of sight of land, and there were no other craft on the radar, nor were there any aircraft visible.  When the signal comes back, it appears just as suddenly as it disappears.

Due to the separate nature of the affected units, I'm certain that the source of the problem is some sort of signal disruption.  After the first incident we assumed that we were the victims of a jamming signal, but given our remote location during the second signal loss, that would have to be a long range signal indeed.  I'm also reasonably certain that the disturbance doesn't originate from anywhere on board, as no equipment was switched on or off during or previous to the anomalies.  The TV antenna amplifiers on board have all had their power supplies disconnected, as the system is decommissioned.

So far I'm drawing a total blank on this, and I'm getting a little worried.  The Man expects a definitive answer to the problem.  Any help or feedback wanted!

The Surprise Enema Machine

We departed La Rochelle at 3:30 on Sunday morning for St. Nazaire. There was a bit of a westerly coming in as we made our way out through the approach channel, and Daphne stubbornly dug her nose into the chop and sent huge sheets of spray flying in all directions. I had the con with Bart until eight o'clock, and we fought our way through the drowsiness until the time came to hit the bunk.

I fell into an uneasy slumber, and was more dead than awake by the time George gently called from the doorway an hour and a half later. The alarm buzzer was beeping on the bridge, and it was my time to shine. At this time the ship was rolling heavily over to Starboard every few seconds, and when I came up on the bridge I realized that we'd been hit by a serious Biscayne squall. The sea had turned an ugly, leaden shade of gray, and patches of spindrift were skipping from crest to crest. George quite calmly reckoned that the wind wasn't much more than thirty knots or so, but the conditions looked alarming to me, especially as he told me that the wind had only been up for fifteen minutes.

None of the lamps in the alarm panel were lit, but the buzzer didn't respond to either the reset or off buttons. I was jabbed by a jolt of concern for my baby, rumbling steadily away in the engine room, but apparently unhappy about something. I rushed downstairs and scanned the gauges. Temperatures: Normal. Oil pressures: Normal. Air pressure: Normal. As I went through my list, my heart rate slowly settled back to normal. All the while, we kept rolling fifty-odd degrees over to Starboard, so that I had to constantly brace myself on the scorching hot pipes around the main. This is why you keep the engine room floor clean at all times; If it had been covered in oil, I wouldn't have had a chance of keeping my footing.

As it turned out, there was an intermittent fault in the bilge water alarm circuit, so I deactivated the buzzer (Snip!) and told the bridge crew to keep a sharp eye on the red light signifying a main engine alarm condition. At this happy conclusion I suddenly felt the urge to take a leak, so I made my way down to the port side toilet. There was an awful stench in the air, and the whole area was fantastically dirty. Too tired to give a fuck, I simply took my piss standing up, as opposed to my custom of sitting down when the sea is up. Thank God for that, or I would have had my first surprise enema. The toilet slurped, gurgled and without further warning spewed its contents forth in a deluge of flying shit that reached at least a couple of feet above the bowl.

Applying my engineering mind to what was essentially a hygiene problem, I concluded that the waves slamming us on the port side created a pressure spike in the pipe, with said spectacular results. Oh well. I should probably see about freeing up that frozen valve so that we can shut it while at sea. Exhausted and disgusted, I stumbled back to my bunk and unsuccessfully tried to get a nap before it was my time back at the con. On the bridge for the final leg into St. Nazaire, I received the news that the GPSes had failed yet again. Same symptoms as last time – all of them had suddenly lost their signal. This gave me a bit of execise with the little Raymarine back-up radar, using ERBL/VRM to plot a more or less accurate track until the GPSes magically came back on line.

The harbor approach was somewhat tricky, as the ocean swell surging into the dredged channel conspired with the two knots of tidal current to make the autopilot near useless for maintaining a steady track over ground. Still, we made it without incident, and I handed the con over to The Man to go through the lock and to our assigned berth. That part went smooth as silk, even the lock certainly wasn't too big for us. In the picture (thanks, Gwen!), you have Bart and myself grinning at the clearance. In an instant we transisted from the noise and commotion of passage making to the surpreme calm of a ship on the dock, the generator quietly purring away in the engine room.

St. Nazaire is perfect for this month of maintenance. It's a seriously industrial little town, with a major shipyard servicing the big cruise liners, and it has everything you might need to repair a ship. It's also working class to the bone, and I'll have no problem fitting in with the locals. To top it all off, there are several HUGE German submarine bunkers in town, which look perfect for exploration. Look forward to an illustrated update if I find the time for that.

(Note the 20-odd thousand horsepower MAN diesel abaft of the two tugs)

You got the con, dude!

Bart (our new deck hand) and I really do make a good bridge team. I gave him an introductory course on the Decca radar, and in short order he was tracking all targets and calling out interesting CPA's as they came up on the screen. In the first day he pretty much mastered the rest of the essential bridge electronics, and my role was reduced to sitting with my feet up, calculating course changes on the Transas and calling out heading changes. We're both still getting a kick out of conning a proper motor ship. Good times all around.

We departed St. Malo for Brest on Sunday morning with only a few meters per second from the north-west, the North Atlantic lapping gently on our starboard side. As we approached Cap Frehel across the bay, Bart called the whole crew to the bridge for the magnificent view. It got quite crowded, with oohs and aahs nearly blanketing out my steering commands.

Given the extreme tides combined with a chaotic bottom topography, keeping the ship on course has been a bit of a challenge along the coast of Brittany. The autopilot does a brilliant job of keeping the ship's head on track, but the currents keep pushing us off, sometimes by as much as thrity degrees in a short moment.

After we rounded Cap Frehel, the old Decca Bridgemaster radar's screen went blank, and the set issued a nasty burnt smell. At this, José decided to cut our journey short, and we put into St-Quay-Portrieux. On the approach, the door to the bridge suddenly decided that it wouldn't open any more, and shortly thereafter the four GPSes on board suddenly lost their signal. We later figured out that one of the French fishing boats in the vicinity must have put a jammer on us (Motherfuckers!), but at the time we had more than enough with making the rather tricky approach on visual nav only.

We stayed in Portrieux just long enough to re-provision, and set off the next morning for Brest. Once we got into open water, we hit a moderate but short sea straight ahead, and some of the guests got uncomfortable.

Yet again it was decided to cut our journey short, and we made our way down to Lesardrieux. It proved to be a fantastically idyllic little place, but the town had nothing to offer, save for a sad "Bar du Yacht" filled with arrogant locals who clearly didn't like the looks of Bart and myself in our working clothes. Thus, we made another early morning departure, making for La Rochelle.

At the time of this writing, we are meeting a Force 7 head on, with 2-3 meter waves, but these are not the conditions when I get my camera out to document it. The inclinometer doesn't lie, though. It has been decided to put into Roscoff for the night.

...

So we finally made it to La Rochelle. The sea got almost spectacular, developing into a solid 3.5 meter chop, rising very steeply as the Atlantic met the continental shelf on an opposing tide. At last I got to see the wave plow do its bit, a fantastic sight as the ship picked up a ton or two of green water on the fore peak, then dispersing it into a heavy spray that made the bridge shudder with the impact as she pitched back. Further into the Bay of Biscay the sea settled down to a solid five meter swell, giving us almost dry decks, but presenting challenges of its own as we turned south-west and took it on our starboard quarter. The autopilot really had its work cut out for it then, but the Yaw and Rudder settings on max kept us on a zig-zag course for the goal.

Luckily, it all passed without mechanical calamity, aside from a little scare as the Kubota generator dropped a phase. Thank god for backups! Now we're settled securely into the locked harbor, Bart and myself busy with all the little jobs that accumulate at sea, planning for our upcoming layup period, when The Man will be away and we'll be working hard to get her ship-shape for the dash south into the Med.

Hello from St. Malo

We've spent the past few days in an anchorage in Dinard, across from St. Malo. I was planning to write an illustrated update about the old town, but sadly I've hardly had time to go on shore, and have only spent a few hours wandering around the old fort. It is a monument to the allied efforts to crack Hitler's Festung Europa, bearing the scars of battle where armour piercing rounds have impacted the old pill boxes. Now it makes a stark contrast to the quaint town across the bay with its (to me) exotic trees and haphazard French architecture.

In a bout of generosity, José bought us a lightweight dinghy to play with. It is a Suzumar FIB (Floppy Inflatable Boat) with a 9.9 Suzuki on the back, and it makes a fine combination for riding two up. Most of my free time has been spent sightseeing by dinghy, a delightful pastime, cruising around the rugged cliffs and the old forts guarding the harbour approach.

Meanwhile, I've been well and truly busy in the engine room. It is a fact of life that when you're operating a fifty year old ship, surprises will happen. Meanwhile, the deck hand I recruited in Oostende has had his contract confirmed by José, as he makes a fine addition to the crew. It is a great relief not to worry about keeping the decks clear when I have to deal with miscellaneous engineering concerns.