After our side excursion to Plombières-les-Bains and Remiremont, we had about a fortnight before we were due on a plane back to Australia. Plenty of time to prepare Eben Haezer for the winter and secure her to withstand six months or so alone, empty and more or less unattended.

Thanks primarily to lots of advice and practical example from Knud and Erica, who had prepared their own boat Linquenda and departed a couple of weeks prior, we had a pretty good idea of what we needed to do.

The first job was to prepare the central heating system to withstand the harshness of a Lorraine winter, with temperatures well below zero, snow, and a frozen canal. Because Eben Haezer had previously been lived on year-round, the heating system was not “winterised” and so her boiler and pipes and radiators were filled with plain water. We needed to replace that with a mix of water and an appropriate form of anti-freeze.

A lovely chap from the marine workshop at Corre, further down the Canal des Vosges, was doing some work on our new American friend Ron’s big tjalk, and we were able to get him to help us, including supply of the correct anti-freeze and a demonstration of how to pour it into the system (to be honest, before his help, we didn’t even know where the inlet for the system was located!)

The process involved a complicated series of operations to release water from the system, replace it with the anti-freeze solution, and re-pressurise the system. While we were doing this we also decided to replace some of the older fittings – thermostatic valves and so forth. We spent several days on it in the end, as we discovered new leakage points each time we re-pressurised, necessitating a new round of pressure release and refill. We hope that we now know all we need to know about marine central heating systems!

We spent a bit of time touching up paintwork inside and out, washing curtains, cleaning rugs and carpets and stowing things in winter storage. Our bilges had thankfully stayed bone dry throughout the season, but I did a bit of cleaning in and around the engine room and generator room. There was still work I wanted to do (or, rather, commission a skilled person to do) on the electrical system, but decided it could wait until our return.

We bought extension leads and rigged them up so that while we were gone our friends who were staying in the port over winter could plug them into the power supply a couple of times a month, or when it got especially cold, to operate our battery charger. Other than the charger connection, when we left the boat we disconnected the battery banks from their circuits to prevent unnecessary drain from them.

The other last-moment task was to drain all water from the boat’s plumbing systems – the hot water boiler, the toilet cistern, the inlet and outlet pipes. As far as it was possible, we needed to remove all water from the system to avoid damage from frozen pipes and mechanisms. This involved connecting a bicycle inner tube to the main inlet, then one by one opening taps as I pumped air into the system with a small compressor until the taps released nothing but air. For the drainage system, I simply poured a standard anti-freeze down the sinks, bath and toilet.

We were now ready to leave Eben Haezer at her berth in Épinal and make the journey home for the southern summer.

On our last evening, we took Ron and Fredi to dinner at the Capitainerie, to thank them for all the help and companionship they’d provided us since our arrival. They couldn’t help themselves, though: the next day, Fredi cooked us all a magnificent breakfast, packed a lunch for Jane and me to enjoy on the train, and drove us to the railway station. Such friendships and generosity are a major part of what makes us keen to return next year.

And so it was that on Sunday 6 November, 2016 we locked the doors and hatches on Eben Haezer, humped our bags onto the train at Épinal for the short trip to Nancy, then the even shorter bus trip from there to the Lorraine TGV station, and then a very, very fast train ride to Paris-CDG-Roissypole.

Our plane was booked for the following day; we decided to spend our last night in France at a hotel close to the airport terminal. The citizen M hotel was a great choice – great value, handy to the railway station as well as to the terminal, very chic and modern and quiet, It was a great way to rest before our long journey home.

The day of our departure decided to put on a little farewell for us, with a touch of wet snow and  cold winds.

We didn’t care; we were headed for an Australian summer…….