The Waiting Game

Finally on the water - sea trial

The past week has been a busy one, with lots of things to accomplish plus plenty of hurry up and wait time. We started on Saturday with a sea trial up the Burgundy Canal to the first lock and back to our dock. We were checking to see how much steering fluid we were leaking, if any at all. When we arrived the steering fluid reservoir was empty as was most of the steering system.

On our trial it turned out we leaked about a 1/4 inch of fluid on our one hour cruise. This problem will have to be fixed before we start cruising. The rest of the weekend was spent cleaning, reading and walking back and forth to the store.

Monday we met with the owner of the yard that works on Juniper. We basically let him know we would be staying till the steering was fixed. He told us they would get on it maybe today, maybe tomorrow, maybe Wednesday. Turned out it was Wednesday, end of the day. They gave the system a five minute check and said they’d be back in the morning.

Thursday morning the mechanic was back, and shortly after arriving we saw him walk off with a piece of our steering hydraulic system. That evening we were told they had found a leaky hose and would have a custom hose built in Dijon. But he wasn’t confident anything would happen. While waiting, Joan started picking at some of our colored striping that was coming off and making Juniper look really tacky. Next thing we knew we were on a three day project to take off a stripe, that ran around the house, using a scraper, heat-gun and some really toxic solvent to remove the remaining adhesive - it was just called Universal Solvent - and came with lots of warnings.

Sunny day walk & beer on the quai

Friday morning the mechanic returned with the magic part and reassembled our steering and bleeds the system of air. By this time boats had been moved around and there was no way for us to get out, so we kept removing striping. In the late afternoon a crew showed up to move boats and the next thing we knew we were on our way out for another sea trial, this time on the Saône River. Juniper passed her sea trial with flying colors, so we’ve moved from the repair quai to the marina,  ready to start cruising - Except The Salon Fluvial starts Saturday in Saint Jean de Losne, it’s the biggest inland water boat show in France, and we’re right where it will all be happening. We’ve got to stick around and let Joan do some boat show research, no problem talking Michael into staying - or was it Michael talking Joan into staying.