Woke up at 6.30 and peaked out the window to see that it was just beginning to snow.  It was still dark but in the beams of light it looked more like a mixture of snow and rain.  By 7.00 when it was getting light it was definitely snow, but was melting as it landed.  But the snow got heavier and heavier and by 7.30 when I woke Ian it was lying about 1cm deep.

 

By 8.30 when it stopped snowing it was an inch deep and lying in drifts against the window.

Lovely, I’m so glad it snowed.  It seemed no colder than other days, although it never got above 3C even when the sun came out later.  However I am awfully pleased that we did not have to work outside. 

There is a bareboat charter company called Le Boat which is based at a marina about 10km from here and this is where they bring out their badly damaged boats that need a bit more than TLC at the end of the season.  Two of the guys that we have got very friendly with work for Le Boat and have been at it hammer and tongs ever since we have been here, getting their boats ready for re-launch – which is tomorrow!  No matter how bad the weather, hail, sleet or snow, they have been out there fixing things.  And tomorrow they start launching the boats at 6.30. Ouch!

So, apart from the excitement of the snow, what did we do today?  Well, I didn’t do much at all.  Thijs, son and manager of the boat side of the business, was epoxying the bottom of the 14m boat next to ours in the paint shed and the fumes are horrendous.  They wear special expensive respirators which we don’t have.  Ian spent a while in there sanding the epoxy filler along the water line which has taken 2 days to dry hard enough to sand.  And came out with a headache.  I spent a lazy morning, taking photos of the snow, cleaning our room and toilet, watched a movie on the laptop, did some knitting, and made a delicious veggie soup for lunch – what normal people do, I suppose!

At lunch time we decide this is a curry sort of day so I made a marinade for chicken and left it to steep all afternoon.  Then went to do some boat-cleaning, after Ian had finished all the sanding he needed to do, and scratching-paint-off-the-stainless-steel for an hour or two (and that’s stretching it!). Ian painted a second coat of epoxy primer onto the underwater hull of Njord, then came in for a break from the fumes and set up the iBoost wi-fi extender which we bought recently.

Wow, what a gadget – an absolutely must-have if you have a campervan or boat and want internet reception, or even to extend wi-fi reception in your own home.  You get them from a company called Motorhome Wifi in the UK: http://www.motorhomewifi.com/catalog/iboost-wifi-system/  As you can see I am so impressed I even doing some PR for them!