Living the dream – Bill and Winnie Post talk to me about their gorgeous old tjalk, Gretige Henriette

I first saw Gretige Henriette and met her owners Bill and Winnie Post two years ago, when Roy and I arrived in the port of Moissac after our three-month-long journey on Karanja from England.

Originally hailing from New York, they have been living in California for many years. Now, though, they spend four to five months each year in France aboard their unique vessel.

When I eventually caught up with them again, it was two years later in Castelnaudary, one of the prettiest ports on the Canal du Midi. They’d been here for five weeks, and were currently engaged in the dirty, difficult and painstaking task of re-caulking the deck. In mid-summer, with temperatures in the mid-to-high 30s, that’s a real labour of love!

Gretige means “eager” in Dutch – so, Eager Henriette. The name seems to have a sexual connotation, says Bill, as Dutch people tend to snigger a bit when they see it. A badge on the wheelhouse bulkhead (shown below) reads Stichting Stamboek Ronde en Platbodem Jachten – roughly translating as “foundation for round and flat-bottomed yachts” .

Where does she come from?

Gretige Henriette was built in in 1932 in Groningen, The Netherlands. Unlike our mutual friends Jack and Sanne’s Artemis, which I blogged about last year and you can read about here, she was a pleasure craft right from the start – never a working boat.

It is unknown who built her, or for whom. But she does have a cousin boat, says Bill, a similar ship with the same dimensions, also built in Groningen and around the same time. Now named The Bear, she was ordered by Herman Goering, but he never took delivery of it. The Canadians played a big part in the war effort in the Netherlands, particularly in its reconstruction, and a Canadian officer bought The Bear and had her shipped back home to British Columbia. Bill believes that she may still be an active boat in Vancouver.

Gretige Henriette’s hull is similar to that of the older barge Artemis in size and shape, with one important difference: hers is of steel, rather than iron. That makes welding a whole lot easier, he explains.

Why this boat?

Bill and Winnie owned sailing boats before, in New York. While living in Paris, they saw Gretige Henriette and loved the look of her. “At first, I walked away,” says Bill – “I knew that she’d be just too much work.” He knew that a boat like this would require much constant attention.

Then, in 2013, when they saw her formally listed for sale, they knew she needed the right person to buy her. So they did it.

Though not regretting the purchase, Bill is finding that he doesn’t have the energy for this sort of hard work anymore… and yet, doing things himself has always been a point of pride, he says. What’s more, when it comes to something like re-caulking a deck, you can’t hire people to do as good a job as you’ll do yourself!

Special features

One interesting structural feature is the interior roof beams; instead of being solid, as you might expect from an old boat, they are in fact laminated. This was quite revolutionary for the time, Bill explains.

“In the 20s and 30s, they were experimenting with laminates, polymers and waterproof resorcinols – the predecessors to epoxy resins, and at the cutting edge of marine technology at the time.”

He marvels when he works on Gretige Henriette, says Bill. “There is nothing square or plumb or at a right angle in the whole boat. Every line is a compound curve; even cupboards that look square are not actually square, because the boat itself is all curves.”

She’s very well built, too. “The doors are solid,” says Winnie, “and they weigh a ton.” The Netherlands having very few trees, all the wood (mahogany?) – must have been imported.

What changes have they made?

Not many. With the help of boat contractor Serge Ribes in Toulouse, they altered the rudder, shortening it so that it would balance better. He also fixed the bow-thruster. A tjalk is like a bar of soap, says Bill – notorious for skating across the water. “Without a bow-thruster, we’d be constantly banging into things.”

The interior was designed with a rear cabin for the captain and his wife, plus berths for five crew at the front. But the private cabin is too short – barely six feet long – so Bill and Winnie sleep up front, where it’s also cooler. His berth is a narrow one, but 6.5 feet long; she sleeps diagonally on another one that’s short but wide.

Near disaster

Last summer, to their horror, Gretige Henriette sprang a leak and was in danger of sinking. They’d just come out of a month in dry dock in Toulouse and were green-moored on the river Hérault, near Agde, when it happened.

Luckily, they had taken the floorboards out for some reason or other, and immediately spotted the six-to-eight inches of water in the bottom of the boat. “We started bailing, made for Agde and moored up on the canal (du Midi) for the night.”

Next day, Bill went straight to Allemand Chantier Naval (www.myship.fr) at Agde, and the couple have only good things to say about the place and their treatment there.

“They were amazing, the best shipyard we’ve ever dealt with – so professional, so nice, and also so much cheaper than anywhere else. It’s a family business with one son and three daughters: all on the spot, and all capable of doing the job, including the welding.”

Though Allemand usually requires reservation a year in advance, they treated this as an emergency, says Bill. The leak wasn’t easy to find. “It turned out to be a hole the size of your thumbnail, a few inches under the waterline, right where newer plating met older plating.”

By that time, it was already the end of September. And then Gretige Henriette had another hiccup – a rusty rivet six inches above the waterline, at the stern – and by the time that had been fixed by Allemand, it was too late to cruise up the Rhone to St Jean-de-Losne as planned.  “Odile (at the capitainerie) made room for us at Castelnaudary, and here we are.”

Hiccups are part of the business of barging, however – and if you’re not prepared to deal with them, you probably shouldn’t even think of investing in an old treasure like Gretige Henriette.