(Haven't been able to post blogs as often as we'd like recently, so this one dates back to 30 July...)

Yay! We finally fixed the leaky propellor shaft in the stern of Liberty. Okay, to you this might not seem like anything momentous, or even worth a 'Yay!', but it was for us, and we learned a lot along the way.

It all became possible - after months of worrying about the endless drip from the propellor shaft - thanks to an ex-Naval bloke called Simon, who these days runs a boatyard at Laroche-Migennes, which is south of Paris and on the Yonne River.

Simon's a gruff, bearded, barrel-chested bloke in overalls, and is a lover of old wooden boats. He has some over a hundred years old and his yard looks like a boat museum, except nothing seems to be restored. It looks almost as though a tsunami has swept a whole lot of boats up onto dry land and then receded, leaving them higgledy-piggledy, yet all propped up, waiting for sanding down and repainting. He has a special liking for old lifeboats.

But we were more concerned with our own boat, and our own lives. We still had a leaky prop shaft, and we were booked to go to the UK on 20 August so we needed to get the ever-increasing drip sorted before we did so.

There were two ways of going about this. One - the easiest - would be to pay someone to do it. The other is to do it ourselves. Since we are unemployed and on limited financial reserves, we weren't too keen on the first option.

Consequently I spent two hours sweating and grunting down behind the gearbox where the prop shaft enters the housing that goes to the stern of the boat. It's like one tube inside another, and where the smaller one enters there's what's called a stern gland, in which some wadding is compressed to stop any water leaking into the boat.

Ours had been dripping almost since our maiden voyage last September but a bilge pump with float switch had always taken care of it. We had decided this temporary measure would suffice until we were in a position to fix it - or get it fixed - properly. However, the drip had recently increased to the point where the pump was activating every few hours, and Liz in particular was getting angsty about the amount of water we seemed to be taking on.

The issue was also one of conflicting advice. Throughout our journeying we had encountered many boaties with vast experience, and they had all given us advice on how to tackle the leaky prop shaft. They all agreed on one thing... it would be necessary to remove the old stern gland packing and replace it with new stuff.

The problem was, none of them could agree on whether the boat should be taken out of the water for the repair, or left in. Some said it should be pulled out of the water by crane, or in a cradle, which would mean the old packing could be removed without water pouring in from outside. Others said no, leave it in the water, because even with the old packing removed, the amount of water entering would be manageable, and anyway, that's what the bilge pump is for.

I was willing to 'give it a go' in the water, but Liz was concerned that if water did suddenly start deluging the boat, how would we cope? It was a good point. Eau the dilemma.

Simon at Laroche-Migennes was the first person (and the only professional) to reassure us that the amount of water likely to enter would be minimal, and controllable. He applied a maths equation to it, based on the dimensions of the boat and the quantity of water that it could hold before sinking. He teased Liz about her caution, and offered to lend us his set of bendy corkscrew-type implements to remove the old packing.

And so it came to pass that I spent a hot and unpleasant time wedged between the gearbox and the stern gland, removing brass flanges and worming out the old packing, while Simon sat on the steps and talked to Liz about his naval career, his Mum emigrating to New Zealand with a man she'd known for seven years but who left her within three days of arriving, and about his old wooden boats. I was glad they were having fun.

Meanwhile, Simon had been right; the amount of water that came in was minimal, and actually not much more than the drip itself. It took me a while to realise that I was trying to wedge in the wrong-sized wadding though, and once we'd established it should be 6mm and not 8mm the whole process went smoothly. In reality, had I started with the correct gauge of packing in the first place the whole thong would have taken less than an hour, and we'd have heard a lot less of Simon's life story. But we'd have missed out on it too.

Anyway, the repair worked, and now, for the first time since we bought Liberty we don't have a leaky propellor shaft. Yay! To say that Liz was relieved is an understatement, but at least it wasn't an underwaterstatement. To celebrate, she and I drank a bottle of bubbly to celebrate that night, especially as we had saved ourselves over €400, which is what it could have cost if we'd had to get the boat craned out of the water. Plus my labour was free, and the only thing we paid for was the actual stern gland packing, which looks like a chunky bit of hurricane lamp wick. It's another bit of the boat that we can tick off as 'done', and we can feel a degree of smugness that if it ever leaks again we at least know how to fix it, and that it definitely absolutely positively can be done with the boat in the water!

Now we know we can safely leave the boat while we nip back to England later in August, without worrying whether the bilge pump will cope with the drip. What we didn't know however was that Liz and I were to have further stern words, between us. A spat. A falling-out. But that's for the next blog...