First Week First Job

Europe » France » Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur » Antibes
June 5th 2009

Published: June 9th 2009

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Dawntreader II

Milan Giro

Hello all,

Welcome to the first blog post of who knows how many, remember to subscribe at the end so you get sent an email if I update my posts.

Well I finally find myself with an untimed internet connection and an English keyboard, so I thought I might as well update you on what's going on. I wanted to add some of the video to this entry but I don't want to chance trying to upload the software for the camera onto my boss's PC. The last time I did that I was sitting in an upstairs office in an Austrlia bar in Lille only to ind out I'd just crashed the PC which runs the bar's cash register down stairs.

I had a bit of a shock arricing in Milan from Dubai. In typical Lambkin fashion I went to the ATM to get out a couple of hunderd euros to fund my camping gear and train ticket to Antibes only to find it wouldn't let me get out more than 50. I tried at a few different banks thinking that maybe it wasn't accessing my savings account and then checked my email to find

Funny Bike

out they'd then blocked the card. A few hours of back and forth trying to track down somewhere to call from and it turns out the card can only access my credit card account, so after putting some money back in I was all sorted thank god. Turns out I arrived in time for the Giro D'Italia bike race stage in Milan, which was cool to see.

Antibes and the Riviera

The one scary thing arriving back in France was how much my French had suffered. I’m hoping it will come back as I start to meet some more French speakers, but I think having never had such a long break from languages I thought I would just step off the train and speak it perfectly.

I settled in pretty quickly back in to my french tight arse existence. I think I worked out I can leave off around 6 euros a day for food.

1 Euro tinned fruit for breakfast
1 Euro Baguette hal for lunch half for dinner
1:30 Euro brie cheese/salami/pate
1 Euro tomatoes lunch and dinner

Ok, I’m not that disciplined, but I

Breakfast of Champions

did eat only this for at least the first couple of days.

The first week I spent most of the time hitting up the crew agencies in Antibes. Of course the agencies don’t see anyone after lunch time so I still had some time to get out and about and see things.

The three pieces of advice people gave me before heading over were

A) Go to the crew agencies
B) Head down the dock and ask every boat you see if they need crew
C) Go to the pub, as everyone knows yacht crew love to drink

Ironically the only piece of advice I still haven’t really followed is the last one. Although when a beer costs the same as my daily food budget it makes a night out on the town pretty hard to justify.

A small piece of fortune that the time I arrives on the French Riviera was the week of the Cannes film festival and the F1 in Monaco. I went down to Cannes while the film festival was on which was a pretty fun thing to see. I’m not sure exactly what the point of seeing it

Yummy

was though, it seemed to be an exercise in people watching people watching people who may or may not be famous watching people. It was fairly spectacular seeing all the installations for the festival and the wannabe famous types wandering around. Towards the end of the day I stumbled on a little cinema on the edge of the town where I saw a new release French film, so now I can say that I saw a film in Cannes during the Film Festival.

I camped next door to some Aussies who were in town to head to the Grand Prix so on the Friday before competition we headed down to have a look at the track as that was a non competition day. The guy, Dave had been to a few F1s in Aus and overseas and couldn’t believe how open everything was. We had access to go alongside the pits and see some of the team’s going through their practice runs which was pretty cool. Then we did a bit of a tour through the tunnel under the Casino and around the main entrance. I think all the luxury car dealership must have emptied their

Terrine

dealerships for the day as there was barely a car for the Ferraris and porches heading round the track.

The last day of the week I headed in to see my last crew agency which I had been delaying seeing because I kept having issues with my CV being destroyed by ancient copies of Windows Office in internet caffes I was paying 7 bucks and hour for. After giving me a serve for not spending more time on the dock looking for work and too much time in the agencies the agent did mention that she had a couple of sail jobs on the books including a delivery of a Swan down to Istanbul leaving in two days on the Monday. I walked out the door, went to grab something to eat and by the time I was down I’d had a call from the captain, a few questions about what experience I had and I got the green light. The rest of the day which was going to be dedicated to seeing more agencies got turned into a beach afternoon safe in the knowledge that I was going to have some dollars coming in the door.

Saucisson

Before stepping on the boat I did pick up a little treat, my new best friend Bertrand! In Antibes they have an Antiques market where I found this 60/70s French racing bike. I had to ask the guy to hold it for me while I went to buy a chain to lock it up before taking it away, only to find after buying that it had a chain in the bag attached to the handlebars. A chain along with a spare tyre, spare brake cable a set of tools to change tyre and adjust just about everything on the bike… sweet! I took the bike for a little test ride along the coast to Nice which was nice. As the French do the whole way was designated cycle tracks although I still managed to collide head on with the French guy riding along in a almost branch new racing bike, his bike didn’t seem too damaged and good all Bertrand just dusted himself on kept going so no harm done, oops! Not sure what I could have been looking at along the Nice foreshore…

I left the bike in Antibes chained up in what I thought

Tent

was the safest place, although the longer I’m going the more I think someone else might now be enjoying the company of my new bestie…

PS: The bike was still there when I got back, Yeehaa!

Ville Franche sur mer to Istanbul

(map attached)

We jumped on board the boat on Monday afternoon with a few things to do before setting off. Could have done without the near 40 degree heat while we were packing everything into the boat. Could have the poms on the power boat next door playing “The best of british pop 1980s” Collection, getting blind and offering us a beer every 10 minutes.Of course we were able to submit to the offer eventually as we’re ready to go. We set off around 4pm and with a couple of hours before the sun dipped over the horizon I started to dawn on me how far I’d already come on the journey. With everything that I had done to prepare for this moment, there I was motoring out of French waters on a beautiful 56 foot yacht, having a beer (ration one beer per man per day) 30 degrees,

Excessive yachts

breeze blowing across the deck and about to spend the next 8 days getting paid to do what I’d done so many times for free… Aaaaahhhhhhhh!!!!

The boat was a 56 foot Swan, Swan yachts are made in Finland, and basically sit at the top of the production boats above the French brands like Beneteau. The trip was for the most part uneventful. Unfortunately the way the wind eventuated we only sailed for two short periods in the 8 days, which was bad on the one hand but did make the delivery fairly cruisey. But we did have some interesting night sails.

Highlights of the passage were

The hospitality and helpfulness of the Turkish people is amazing. Although we didn’t stay in Greece long enough to

Bertrand

find out the former we certainly worked out the later didn’t really apply to the Greeks. It seems like every Greek who actually makes and attempt to be bothered to do something that required a bit of effort must have left years ago. We arrived in Athens early on a Sunday morning to refuel, and while you can well imagine it being quiet difficult to track down anything on a Sunday in Greece, you would expect there to be somewhere in Capital city of the country which operates more shipping than any other in the world to have somewhere to fuel. The classic story was,

“Sorry, no fuel, pump broken,”
“When will it be fixed?”
“ No, broken long time, three years”
“Do you have a fuel truck?”
“No, Sunday, please leave, go to next Marina, they help you!”

(Translation, “stop making me do something, I was in the middle of a conversation with someone else who don’t wasn’t to help either) Even when we did find somewhere to fuel the first thing they said was, “you can’t stay!” Sorry for all the greek people back in Aus but its been almost funny how hard Greece was to

Monaco

get anything done…

The crew aboard have been great, the captain is an Irish guy who fell into working on boats during college when he was in the US and realized he could earn the same money teaching sailing than he could lifting furniture, now he’s based with the boat in the south of France except for 3 months a year when the boss needs the boat somewhere in the world and its his job to get it there and drive the owner and his family around for the summer, and English guy who’s been living the life down in the South of France, working the occasional yacht job for 7 years, and an English girl who kept our stomachs full with some awesome food during the journey, which anyone who’s cooked on a boat knows is not any easy task. And a bit better than my pre delivery diet.

Istanbul

Istanbul is an amazing place, absolutely beautiful, The turks are a funny lot, amazingly friendly, but you never quite know whether they’re taking you for a ride or not. We bought some of those rounds leather poofs at

Someone famous

he markets the other day and though we got a great price at 35 turkish lira, about the same in Aussie dollars, we thought that was a great price until we went back today and bought the same ones for ten!

We had a fun night out the first night, strange considering we’re in a Muslim country but the rest of the time here has been spent polishing and cleaning the boat, which has consisted of:

Polishing all the stainless
Wet/Dry vacuuming the bilge (the bottom bit on a boat that everything drains into and collects all sorts of crap, not that fun)
Scrubbing the teak decks
Washing and chamoi-ing the hull
Then polishing all the white bits

While the work doesn’t seem too glamorous I am learning a lot about how to take care and maintain a boat, and after 3 years working in an office it feels good to get out and do something with my hands.

I’ve probably bored you all enough by know so I’ll leave it there. Thanks for anyone who read to he end without just skipping to the pictures

As my cash flow gets a bit more secure,

Nice Ketch

I’m going to buy a little net book over here so I can start making the updates more regular and with some of the video footage of the trip. Now its time to head back to Antibes to look for a permanent role and now that I have a bit of cash I might start acting on the third piece of advice about getting yacht work…

Take care and stay in touch!

Phil

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