For the next four months, the Belem will be going through her usual winter stint of being given a thorough overhaul, so as to be totally shipshape when she takes to the seas again in the spring of 2007. A first period of dry dock in Saint Nazaire for a series of spot checks and some paintwork is followed up in December by a stay in Lorient to renovate the quarter deck and for the crew to see to each and every bit of repair and maintenance on the various elements of the ship. Four months may seem like a long time but as Commander Boin puts it : for workmen and crew alike, the whole affair is like a marathon run at the rate of a hundred metre sprint !
This autumn has definitely had a literary flavour for the Belem Foundation : after launching the Belem Literary Prize , awarded to the French woman navigator Isabelle Autissier for her biography of navigator and discoverer Yves Marie de Kerguelen, the Foundation can now announce the arrival on France's bookstands of a beautiful album recounting – with quite a bit of exciting fictional tales mixed in - the adventures of the Belem, written and illustrated by cartoonist Jean-Yves Delitte.
It all begins on the Belem's very first journey in 1896 : mysterious castaways are taken on board in the middle of the Atlantic and from there on strange things start to happen...
It is written in French, of course, but either you are quite good at reading French and will enjoy yourselves tremendously or your mastery of the language is not quite as it should be and this is exactly what you need to bring it up to scratch in the best possible way!
So don't hesitate to order it directly on our website. It's called :
BELEM – Le temps des naufrageurs
Ed . Glénat – Chasse-Marée
Cost :12,50 €
La BD est aujourd'hui un genre littéraire apprécié par tous les publics et toutes les tranches d'âge. Le talent des dessinateurs permet de donner vie à des histoires infiniment diverses : la BD rassemble, fait rêver... elle devait un jour raconter l'histoire du Belem.
Le Belem est passé en cale sèche le 13 novembre dernier à St Nazaire pour aborder la première phase de son arrêt technique. Passage obligé car il garantit la sécurité de tous, cet arrêt de 4 mois est en réalité une période d'intense activité, comme l'explique, photos à l'appui, le commandant Boin.
