Snork Maiden’s Story

A Nautical Disaster

As you all know, we have a small sailing boat called Snork Maiden. Of course you know, because I named the blog for her, and our travels together – that’s me and Al, not just sailing, but all our journeys, literal and figurative.

MUSIC 🎧

I will try to give you the short version of what happened:

We last sailed Snork Maiden in 2014. At the end of that season we lifted into a boat yard in Charron, a short distance North of La Rochelle in the Baie d’Aguillon. Here’s the exact place, for those of you who like detail. We intended to keep sailing, but decided on a year off to explore Sardinia. Then, stuff happened. Chiefly Al’s aged parents got into various kinds of trouble, my closest friend got sick, and Snork Maiden remained on dry land.
Port du Corps de Garde

It’s an attractive, if sometimes desolate spot.
Although we haven’t sailed, the boat has been safely kept on land all this time. We visited every year to check her out, do any work necessary, and generally keep in touch. We made a brief stop in 2019, whilst finalising the sale of our fermette in Deux Sevres. I made lists of work to be done and went shopping at the Southampton Boat Show in the Autumn of that year. (My sister Amanda has some of the purchases safely stowed in her barn in Cumbria.) Every time I have been out to the boat, I have found her dry, clothes ready to wear, sleeping bag ready to use, even tea bags ready for a cuppa. Not this time.
As we climbed the ladder to the cockpit, there was something awfully wrong. The life raft well was open and full of water, the raft floating and the cover lifted. We unlocked the hatch, removed the washboards and saw what we all dread. Water. Lots of it. The bilges were full, the floor level a good 30cms under. Yes, worse if we had been at sea, but this boat was supposed to be safely ashore.

I don’t really want to go into issues of blame. Of course our plans for the 2020 sailing season were scotched by Coronavirus, and 2021 didn’t invite travel. Of course we also had to deal with the sale of the house in Bristol, and my cousin’s house in Hereford. So 3 years since our last visit. There’s no real way to know when the flooding happened. How? Most likely culprit? Blocked cockpit drains. They can sink a boat at sea, and cause flooding on land. They can block quite easily over a couple of winters, although this yard has no tree cover, and no obvious cause of the brown slimy gunk that may have caused the problem. Once the cockpit floods, the cockpit locker may let in water. As I say, no point in going in for blame, although like all owners we thought that the yard would probably do the minimum to see that boats on their land are safe and sound. Enough.
The practical implications of all this were that we had to extend our stay in Marans.

There was a good campsite, very under-occupied, and only around 10km from the boatyard. I am going to skip quickly over the tears (actually more like howls of grief), the heartrending job of emptying the boat, sorting through all the carefully chosen bits of kit, finally winnowed down to little more than a couple of sleeping bags and a miscellany of objects that fit into a shopping bag to take home. And inexplicably, a hosepipe.

Things are in hand with the insurance company, and just as if you write off an old car that has years left, it’s the same for boats. The state of the engine alone practically puts Snork Maiden beyond economic repair. All in all, it was about 10 days before we felt we could move off to Brittany, more-or-less with our original plan, minus Normandy.

Packing up camp is always a 2-3 hour job. The tent comes down pretty fast – it’s all the other gubbins that take the time. My camp kitchen consists of 4 interlocking crates, collected from various skips and roadsides in Kissamos. Cooking is on an alcohol fuelled Trangia (see pic). I took the Camping Gas cooker, but haven’t used it. Too hot, too complicated. One-pot quite enough.

Here’s a taste of Brittany:

Coming soon: A Night to Remember

Afterward; This has really been a difficult blog to write. Temperature in 30s, travel laptop overheating, photos taking ages to load…. and of course a tonne of emotional baggage around Snork Maiden. More than a boat to us, more a way of life. So many things changing, losses and gains, but the losses always seem to weigh more.