Antibes Winter

"There is a specific kind of silence that a person who has spent eighteen months on a boat does not, at first, know what to do with."

May and June 2022. Anouk de Smet is twenty-two. M/Y Aerope is in dry-dock at La Ciotat. The Caribbean season is behind her. She has rented a small studio above the Boulangerie Tordo on the rue Sade in Antibes - three windows, a single small kitchen, a bed on a mezzanine - and she has six weeks to write her MA dissertation and to find out who she is when she is not, in fact, on a boat.

She meets Théo Marchand on the evening of the thirteenth of May, at a bar on the Place Nationale, where she is not looking for anyone - which is, she would come to understand, the only state in which one ever meets anyone. Théo is thirty-one, French, an architect, divorced (no kids, one cat named Pim), and is renting a flat on the rue du Bas Castelet. He cooks her dinner on the nineteenth. She does not, on the way to his flat, tell anyone where she is going.

Over six weeks, between supervisor Zoom calls with Professor Vermeulen in Ghent, and four-in-the-morning conversations with the boulanger Karim Boumaza about his daughters and his wife, and a long weekend in Antibes with her mother Marleen, and a phone call from her fifteen-year-old sister Anneke who has been crying about a boy, Anouk writes seventy thousand words of a dissertation she is not, yet, sure is any good.

And then, on the seventeenth of June, the email from the Halcyon comes - a 55-metre sail-assisted yacht in Greece, Greek-owned, a senior stewardess slot, her own section - and the email turns a feeling into a decision with a deadline, which is the only kind of decision that is real.

Antibes Winter is the third volume of The Yacht Chronicles. The final volume of the first trilogy. A small precise particular Antibes spring, a French dinner, a Belgian wedding, a Marseille train ticket, a Halcyon email, a green dress that stays, for the moment, in reserve.

Set in Antibes, La Ciotat, Marseille, Ghent, Berchem, and the small in-between of a life lived between boats.

Names, vessels, charters, and identifying details have been changed throughout these pages, for reasons of professional discretion. Any reader who believes they have recognised a specific real person, vessel, or charter is, in the author's judgement, mistaken.