Therapy

Last week we did it very tough, holidaying on a boat in the Med off the southern coast of France. By way of explanation, Anna's father (Martin) purchased a 42-foot yacht (called Therapy) in the south of France last year and this was his first year using it. So lucky for us, we also get to take advantage.

Anna had already spent a couple of weeks on the boat (lucky for some!), but for this week Jabs, Brad, Sharon and I went down to join them. We meet them in Toulon, which is the boat's main port of call. We were fortunately joining them just at the end of a week of very high winds, which lash the southern French coast once a summer (it's called the Mistral and is absolutely brutal, with consistent winds of over 50kph). Apart from that they had had excellent weather - which you would expect from the Med - with temperatures in the high-30s. Though the temperatures didn't quite get that high (thank god!), we still had pretty good weather for our week with temperatures in the low 30s.

Straight off we headed out of Toulon the next morning, keen to see how Therapy sailed and get some swimming time. The boat was loaded up with plenty of food, beer and rose, so we had no need to come back to terra firma for a couple of days. The first days sailing tested out our sea legs, and though some of the crew were a little pale-faced for a couple of hours, everyone handled it pretty well. We anchored up in a bay and had our first dip in the Med - apparently the water was quite a bit cooler than it had earlier in the summer, but I didn't mind as it was refreshing. Then we spent the evening doing what was going to be a pattern for the rest of the week, eating plenty of delicious French food and drinking not-so-delicious French beer (though the rose was quite good by all accounts).

After a surprising good sleep overnight (must be the gentle rocking), we took a leisurely cruise over to another island and anchored up for an easy day of eating, drinking, swimming and working on the tan. An interesting encounter happened later in the day when a kiwi guy sided up to us in his Dingy and had a chat with us. He was also anchored in the same cove as part of an America's Cup promotion trip along the Med coast (we later found out he is a big-wig in NZ yachting and is the Senior Race Officer for next year's America's Cup - after doing the same for the two in NZ).

Waking up to a mill pond Med the next morning, we got away early with the intention of mooring at the St Tropez marina and mixing with the A-list celebrities that go there. Our supplies were low as well - and we couldn't survive with our increasingly frequent need for food and beer (it's hard work lying on the deck of a boat!). Unfortunately we couldn't get in, but we could get a mooring at Port Grimaud just around the corner. A bizarre place this, only built 20 years ago from marshland, it looks like they have tried to create a mini-Venice. Not quite my type of place, but could have been a lot worse and was a bit of a laugh. Especially the conversation we had with guy who (eventually) showed us to our mooring....
- "What are you doing?" (in a typical abrupt French accent)
- "We are waiting for the Capitan" (which we had been told to do)
- "What!" (in an even more abrupt French accent)
- "We are waiting for the Capitan"
- "I am the Capitan!" (which we couldn't stop mimicking for the rest of the trip)


The next morning, Martin and I anchored up the boat outside St Tropez while the others took the dinghy and cruised in to check it out for a couple of hours (I had been before many years ago) and get some more ever important baguettes. Reports of enough plastic surgery to make your recycling bin jealous were not surprising and we were happy to be heading off again. Before we did though, we stopped for lunch off a beach around from St Tropez that is famous for being popular with the who's who (apparently Paris Hilton was there just a couple of days earlier). There were certainly plenty of very large (and, we can assume, very expensive) launches also anchored off the beach - or 'gin palaces' as Martin likes to call them. But we were very happy with our little boat and after lunch set sail for another relatively quiet spot out in the islands again.

We managed to get a superb anchorage in Port Cros, which is an island that is a National Park. There were plenty of fish about who decided seem to mind our stale baquettes and we had a great day swimming and diving off the boat - this is what the holiday was all about. So good in fact we intended to stay there the next day. However, with reports of there being quite strong westerly winds over the next two days (we needed to head east), we decided to get away so we could get to Sanary-sur-Mur, a little town Anna had visited before and wanted to take us to.

And it was certainly worth the effort - and it was a bit of an effort, having to fight a reasonably strong westerly to get there. We stayed our last two nights there, moored in the marina and took the opportunity to go out for a couple of very nice dinners. Sanary was just a cute French seaside village, not too many tourists and those tourists that were there were French, and good little pastiseries and a morning market.

It was with a lot of resignation that we departed Saturday morning for the final sail back to Toulon before heading back to London. But we made the most of it with a cracking sail, making quick work of getting back to Therapy's home marina. Though it wasn't without drama, with the Genoa sail getting ripped (thankfully it probably needed replacing anyway) and some difficult maneuvering to moor in the Toulon marina where we had lots of little French men giving us the steely eye.

But we got away safely (though reluctantly) that afternoon - though this holiday wasn't done with us yet. We had heard about the security scare earlier in the week and the delays it was causing, so we weren't expecting a smooth trip back. But none of us thought much of the 2-hour queue to check in and then the 3-hour delay to take-off. Ironically, they told us it wasn't so much the increased security that had delayed the plane, but the baggage system at Gatwick going down earlier in the day. We eventually landed back in London at 2.30am (scheduled arrival was 11.30pm), but then had to also wait another 30-minutes in the plane because no one was there to connect the stairs to the plane! To make matters worse, we missed the 3.15am train back into London by a matter of minutes and were told a taxi would be a 45-minute wait and £100. So we gotourselvess a coffee and waited for the 4.15am train, finally getting home at about 5am! So a bit of a bummer end to the trip, but we still had Sunday to recover and nothing could really get us down after such an awesome week.

P.S. Being back on terra firma was an interesting experience, taking a while to get our "land legs" back and catching yourself swaying.





For some more pics, click here.