Mr Perkins

We should know the boat well enough by now to make some decisions on the ten year plan for it, so I calmly started pulling off panels again, to check out the old hull repairs in detail, and try to find the source of the oil leaks in the engine.

There are a couple of spots where the hull still needs a bit of work, and I'm sure I'll make some sort of pretence at starting it before handing it over to the merry men at NavigFrance to finish many months from now.

I asked the question about reconditioning the engine though, and got  a look from Jacques that made me think he was going to scream "sacre bleu!" at the top of his voice.  I have no idea why I thought that, but in the old war comics of my youth, that's what French people always said when they had that look.   Despite two weeks of wiping it clean and watching carefully, I haven't been able to see where the oil leak was emanating from, so Jacques, now with some urgency in his demeanour, scurried off to find the big gun.

Michel arrived, looked it over with the intensity of a surgeon about to extract a brain, then pronounced something that was interpreted as "Well there are some boats that have clean engines, but this one doesn't."

But they will talk to Alain, who was the technician at the hire base who maintained it previously, which either leaves me hopeful that someone will know what to do, or entirely without hope because it was too hard to fix which is why he had the boat sold in the first place!   

On the other hand there's the view of Duncan, the British engineer who said the reason they don't make computers in the UK is that they couldn't work out how to get them to leak oil.

For all of that we may have saved a few dollars.  If Mr Perkins is going to be reliable, noisy, smelly and grubby for the next ten years well I guess it will be in good company.