We returned from Scotland in late July and continued to get ready to embark on our watery adventure. We now had nearly everything sorted – skipper and radio operators licenses, new marine radios and Ship Station IDs/licences, boat insurance, and so forth. On board, we had inherited most of what we needed in the way of furniture and equipment, and what we didn’t have or didn’t like we acquired or replaced easily enough.

We enjoyed fantastic assistance from many people, including the previous owner, the wife of the yacht club president, and new friends we made among the small community of boaties in the yacht club. Foremost among these was Roland, an amiable Frenchman who had lived and worked in Belgium for many years as a professional boatman and now lived with his Belgian wife Myriam on a beautiful big boat moored right behind us.

Roland didn’t speak English at all and our French was still pretty poor, but we were able nevertheless to communicate on a range of subjects, technical and philosophical, with the aid of hand gestures, google translate and occasional help from Myriam, who spoke passable English. Roland found various spare bits and pieces for us to use on Eben Haezer, including an old ladder and some plywood and checkerplate we used to make quite a nice “passarelle” gangway. Pierre, the previous owner, several times drove us to chandleries around northern Antwerp to buy our new radios,  rope, fenders, and other boaty bits. Roland and Myriam also provided wonderful friendship and entertainment.

We were still waiting on the arrival of our ship’s papers from the Netherlands. We had been in Schoten for a month and were getting decidedly itchy feet so, after consulting with a few allegedly knowledgeable locals, we decided we may as well leave and let the papers catch up with us later. They would be delivered electronically in any case, and we thought that as long as we stayed within the borders of Belgium we should be OK. In final preparation, we bought a couple of bicycles and commissioned a local printer to produce shiny new letters for our boat hull, with her name, home port and registration  number. We didn’t know what that number was yet, so we just got him to print a bunch of numerals we could stick on later….

We had already booked and paid a deposit for a winter berth in Roanne in France, and we knew we needed to leave very soon to make it there by the end of the season. So, with a sense of excitement and trepidation, we set August 10 as our date of departure……

We plotted a course east towards the Meuse River, then south towards the French border. Apart from being the “scenic route”, it had the decided advantage of giving us a few days of quiet cruising along rural canal ways, rather than beginning our maritime life in the massive locks and heavy commercial traffic that we would have met if we had gone directly south via Brussels.

We checked our equipment and supplies, rechecked our charts, breathed deeply, and got ready for a whole new experience.