After a short, sweet and final cruising season earlier this summer Linquenda is now up for sale. Lying just outside Beziers in Southern France, Linquenda is waiting for new owners and new adventures. Here is link to Linquenda’s broker website, and another to a youtube video on Linquenda.

Dad and i arrived in Toulouse a few days ago to get the boat ready for the short two month cruising season that Mum and Dad are running this year. Linquenda was still afloat, no pipes burst and no animals made homes aboard the vessel during the winter so that more or less means we did a good job winterizing the boat last fall. It did take the better part of the day just to wash all the soot and dirt off the boat though, pretty dirty, one wonders if there are still old biddies burning coal in this town?

Dad is reunited with his beloved Lidl (german discount supermarket chain) and makes daily pilgrimage to stock up on vittles and the fine selection of vin du pays to be had. So far the sauerkraut & sausage in a can has been a hit as compared with the cassoulet in can, which was a bitter disappointment. “It’s not a real cassoulet unless it has duck, pork and a bit of toulouse sausage in it”, wieners just don’t count.

Tomorrow our celebrity small book artist friend Brandy Fedoruk (author of numerous editions in the Ampersand Gallery) arrives to help out with some painting and varnishing. Should be fun times.

The picture above shows us winding our way through Toulouse last fall on the last day of that season.

Our brother Matthew Wolferstan created this sketch for this year’s Christmas card. It’s from a photograph that Dad took while he was with us this past Autumn. Matthew took the liberty of editing the unsightly plastic rental boats that were in the photograph and substituted them with a couple of finer sailing craft, though how they got up the River Baise is a mystery…

Come join us on Saturday January 30th 2010 in Victoria BC for the annual Linquenda open house and crew reunion. Drop in anytime between 2 and 6pm. We will be swaping stories and pictures and catching up with old friends over wine and cheese. This years event is being hosted by Clementien and Bill in their home (address below) please RSVP to wolferstan@shaw.ca if you can make it, we’d love to see you there!

20-416 Dallas Road, Victoria BC.

The house is located one block North of Dallas Road at the South-East corner of Boyd Street and Luxton Avenue.

We arrived back in Victoria BC a few days ago and waiting for us in a massive pile of mail was the third issue of the brilliant Upppercase magazine. We met the creator of Uppercase last march in her Calgary gallery shop. During the past season Brandy & Becky at the Regional Assembly of Text in Vancouver kept us supplied with the first two issues of Uppercase magazine which made for excellent reading while aboard Linquenda. And this third issue features a small article we wrote about our adventures aboard Linquenda. Thanks to Janine for featuring Linquenda! Head over to http://www.uppercasegallery.ca/ to secure your copy…

Here are some visual highlights from our last week, sailing from Moissac to Toulouse in the Company of Holly, Tyler, Geoffrey and Ann, as well as Dad Wolferstan. It was a great week and a fitting end to an adventurous and eventful season. This very well may well have been our last week aboard Linquenda, ever. No promises though.

Look out for more posts on up-coming articles, reunions & plans.

We are now counting down our final days of the season. Today we get back onto the Canal du Garonne, locking up onto one of the most picturesque canal bridges to cross the Tarn river and start the voyage south. We have a full boat for this last week with Geoffrey, Ann, Holly and Tyler and the weather is sunny and still warm, a gentle and welcome ‘hello’ to autumn.

Storm clouds brewed over the riverside town of Nerac the day after we arrived. Before leaving, we experienced our first full days of rain since Spring. The novelty of it, while nice for the first hour, wore off pretty quickly though the rain stuck around for two days. Since then we have had a week of foggy mornings and warm sunny afternoons (yesterday it almost hit 30 degrees). Apparently this Autumn fog/sun thing produces a “noble rot” in wine grapes, sought after by the vinters.

This past week also included a slight change of plan due to a breach in a long section of canal between two locks. A small section of the canal bank gave out and 7 km of canal water drained into the adjacent sunflower field and on through a couple of farm houses before making its way back into the Garonne River. This being the original source of water for the canal at its start back in Toulouse. Excitement City.

Accompanying us during all these hydrological adventures have been return guests and friends from last season, the Gillespies, bringing with them the delightful Charrons, all hailing from Edmonton, Alberta. To the crews’ delight the Gillespies and the Charrons were expert patisserie foragers, and so not only our evening meal but most or our lunchs were followed by a lengthy and elaborate array of the local confectioners’ talents. yum!

We have just two weeks to go before this season’s end. From Agen, where Linquenda rests now, we continue our journey to Moissac to pick up Holly and Tyler  and then toward Toulouse.

What could be better than a week with friends aboard a Dutch barge working your way up a small backwater river? Rounds of tea, followed by by rounds of beer, followed by rounds of boules. Kai and Patrick joined us for the voyage from Moissac to Nerac. The first night we anchored out on the Tarn River beneath the aqueduct and spun merrily in the evening breeze. Then we turned around to lock back up to Canal du Garonne and spent time in the charming town of Valence d’Agen, the ‘bustling metropolis’ of Agen and the vineyards of Buzet before entering the wee river Baise. We spent a quiet and pleasant afternoon and evening in Vianne, and wound our way up the tree-lined river to our final destination the next morning, through the smallest locks we have yet encountered in France.

Our delivery into the town of Nerac was a great surprise, as we moored up between the two bridges in the old tannery district (now full of restored worker’s cottages and contemporary art museums). Our surroundings lit up at night like a small theatre, perfect for those inclined to enjoy a small glass of port and/or a first of autumn pipe.

Back in the day, King Henry IV held court with ‘Margot’ in Nerac, a marriage attempting to work out some row or other between the Catholics and Protestants. The remains of Henry’s family chateau tell the story of a royal lineage who created a ‘petite Louvre’ with writers, poets, intellectuals, comedians and musicians and created a park along the Baise for the royal court to converse and create.

We are looking forward to meeting our next guests (our friend Greg’s parents and aunt and uncle) here to journey back with us to Agen, where we will then be slowly making our way back to our final winter destination in Toulouse…

Thanks to Kai too for his digital photocomposition of the Boules game.