Plumbing in Provence
28 May 2014 | Port Napoleon
JMP
Now here’s something truly obscure and boring to get us underway. All leisure vessels with calorifiers – those hot water tanks heated up by the main engine so you don’t have to take cold showers (we may, later, look into the matter of those who take cold showers voluntarily but that kinky stuff isn’t the point at present) – anyway, all calorifiers have a pressure relief valve so the thing doesn’t blow up when it gets hot. These things, like most stuff supplied to the leisure marine market, are not everlasting and thus need replacement from time-to-time. There are about 1000 boats where the good ship XII Bar Blues spends her winters so logic (silly, I know) would suggest that the local chandlers etc might keep these valves in order to further their aims of relieving yachties of beaucoup de gross margin. Not so; presented with the offending item a look of huge puzzlement descends on their Gallic faces followed, inevitably, by that shrugging business for which they enjoy international renown.
The net of all this is that the skipper and crew spent two full days scouring Provence for specialist plumbing suppliers in order to source an acceptable substitute for the failing valve. In fairness there are worse places in which to conduct such an enterprise; the local produce rewards investigation and the locals themselves, whatever their shortcoming in the matter of plumbing support for yachts, are pretty sound on the subject of lunch.
Fortunately that was pretty much the most trying part of the re-commissioning of XII Bar Blues in 2014 although the replacement of the Windex and its associated little light had the skipper spending more time at the top of the mast than, he will admit privately, he perhaps enjoys.
Now for the Balearics !