After a short break at home to attend to grandchildren, elderly mothers and assorted ne’er do wells  (friends), we fly back from Southampton to Nantes. Even that is not without some late drama courtesy of SW Railway trying to get rid of guards on our trains…or gaurds as GWR would have it….

We leave a slightly drizzly UK and arrive in a sunny Vannes. This is why we sailed south surely. We are forced into a small bar in Nantes to wait for our train and then soak up the last of the evening sun back on Heydays. It is great to be back on board and in the evening sun Vannes takes on a completely different atmosphere compared to the drizzle in which we left. We eat above the capitainerie and it turns out to be one of the highlights…great nosh and a relaxing evening idly watching young people flirting and enjoying a Monday evening in the sun. Despite revelry going on ‘til late we sleep the sleep of the devils….

We need to be away by 8.30 to catch the last of the eb out of the Gulf du Morbihan. By 7.45 we have dashed into town and bought some bread, croissants etc and done some shopping…we nearly ran out of rum!!! We finally slip away at 8.40 and will remember Vannes with great fondness. The late summer sun of the evening before has given way to a threat of heavy showers…we have our waterproofs at the ready. By 9 we are well clear of the canal and the sills and are threading our way between the islands and rocks which are a constant feature of the Golfe.  

With main and a small genny (just so we can count buoys) we are doing around 7 kts over the ground, but at least this is in the right direction…we’ve learnt our lesson.

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At 9.40 the squall strikes. We have gradually put on more and more wet weather layers as the sky became darker and darker, but in the space of 60 seconds the wind turns from a benign 12kts over the quarter to a screaming 30+ kts dead ahead. We furl the genny and haul down the main in a torrent of near gale force winds and lashing rain as the spring ebb takes us through the narrows north of Ile des  Moines at nearly 11kts over the ground, despite being dead into a near gale and with just a bare minimum of engine to give us steerage. And then we are through! The sky clears for a while and we are left sweltering in full weather gear in a gentle breeze from the quarter. With sails up once more we are swept as if on a conveyor out of the Golfe and wave a sad farewell to what must be one of the great cruising grounds of Europe.

There are more sailing boats out than one would expect for a Tuesday morning in mid June, but perhaps that is the whole point! Work/life balance …as the French may say.

We thread our way through the line of rocks off Quiberon peninsular  and round up for Ile du Groix once more. We are looking forward to another stay there on our way to meet Chris who will join us in Concarneau on Thursday. James shakes out the last reef in the main (we don’t have lines led aft) and wonders why he is hanging onto a tall metal object pointing skywards as an ominous clap of thunder echoes off the land behind us. Why is Yee Tak checking insurance policies…just askin’!

In less than an hour, we are close hauled making for the island and gradually losing layers of clothing until finally we are in shorts and T shirts and slapping on the sun cream… This bit of Tuesday is so completely unlike the start, we wonder if we were in a time warp.

Ile du Groix tempts us with sunlit beaches…

and we find ourselves jostling for space in the small harbour once more. After a few fruitless sorties down narrow lines of boats we finally tie up….and relax. This time we wait for a more appropriate amount of time between getting properly moored and breaking out the gin.

This is a great place to hang out and clearly some dark and forbidding French marines (or whatever their equivalent is) think the same…they pretend to be on serious manoeuvres, but we know why they are really here!

We wake up to a different world from the night before. Where there had been the equivalent of a Solent chop and leaden skies, we now have sunshine and a virtual mill pond. Another trip ashore and we are in yet another world.

This is so very different from its next door neighbour. There are some tourists, but the tranquillity is striking immediately and while it has a few motorised vehicles, we can amble down lanes and paths without a care. The gardens and flowers are stunning, almost as if it is an island obsession and the smell of honeysuckle and roses seems to hit us at every corner.

We wander around the little churchyard but are also struck by how many lost their lives in the wars, given that the population has been around 260 or so for decades.

One plaque catches our eye and it is a female sub lieutenant who has won medals for the resistance as well as France’s highest honour, the Croix de Guerre. She was captured and sent to a concentration camp but survived the war finally taking her leave in the 50s. it is all the more poignant as we have been reading the news about the D-Day commemorations both in Portsmouth and in France.

Lunch is typically country French. Just a small café/restaurant, but sitting in the sun with some fish or simple steak in a pepper sauce makes us feel like staying.

As it happens though, we have a tide to catch up to Vannes as we fly home for a couple of weeks on Friday. We meet a Dutch couple who sailed here for the sailing festival, but need to find a new bowsprit from somewhere. Apparently it was broken by a boat to ran into them because its anchor had been lifted by a third boat lifting their own anchor. Good luck in sorting that out with the insurance companies. They seemed in good spirits though and planned to stay in Arz to ride out the storm which is due in Biscay (and over us) on Friday.

Another afternoon genoa dash across the shallows, but this time with the motor running as we complete almost a complete circumnavigation of the little island before heading up the river to Vannes to catch the opening of the swing bridges and locks.

We follow a small local lorry ferry for a while, although ferry is rather a grand name for what is really little more than a glorified floating platform no wider than the lorries themselves.

A moment of lack of concentration (James) finds us heading up the wrong arm of the river down a length of increasingly shallow and narrow channel with boats on either side. We survive…just and back in the main river we are soon moored up next to some other boats waiting for the bridge and the locks. One half of a young couple on the boat next to us is climbing into a wet suit to have a look at his missing propeller. They did well to get this far just on sail in the narrow channels…what it is to be young and impervious to the cold.

With the lights green we motor up to our allotted berth for the next two weeks…to find that it is about 3.3m wide….and we are 3.4m! We can just about moor safely and the capitainerie say they will sort it tomorrow. We have our stern sticking out into the channel, but we fender up and hope for the best!

In the morning we finally get allotted a berth more suited to our girth…and right in the centre near the showers and laundry….this is a glamourous life!

We have a wander round Vannes which is amazingly old and medieval (and yet more toy shops) and then set about snugging down Heydays for the impending storm Miguel (violent storm 11 in Biscay!), before we leave her to fly home for a couple of weeks.

Postscript.

We are sitting on the runway at Nantes in one of FlyMayBe’s tiny planes and are wondering with each gust which shakes us violently whether we will take off. Some passengers seem jumpy, but the attendants seem relaxed ….so it should be OK then.

One break in the cloud allows us a glimpse, just before we land, of the needles and Hurst Spit where we left just 3 weeks ago.

The morning is damp, but we want to have a look around the little town of Locmiquel before we catch the afternoon tide around Ile aux Moines to Ile d’Arz. Dampness turns to a downpour (so glad we sailed south for the sun) and we are forced to hole up in a small bar. They don’t sell food but are more than happy for us to make a dash to the boulangerie and bring back some cakey comestibles to have with our coffee.

Back on Heydays, the last of the ebb has faded and we ease our way over the shallows into what passes as a deep channel in these parts. With a fresh NW breeze we set a smallish genoa, in part to keep our speed down, in part to aid manoeuvrability (and the possibility of losing it rapidly should we  touch the bottom) and in part to be able to see in order to hop from buoy to buoy. We are still doing over 5 kts though and we count off the buoys and markers in rapid succession. The channels go very close to the jaggedy bits of rock in places but we trust the charts and the echo sounder and round up to head for our next little island. The buoyage changes direction here as we are now effectively going against the flood and we need to remember to now leave the green ones to port…until another new channel and we are back with it….leave the green ones to starboard. With a freshening breeze gusting well over F5 we search out a likely anchorage, but again seem only to find mooring buoys. The forecast for the night is for occasional F7 so we are happy to pick up a vacant mooring (there are several to choose from) having sussed out that there are some bigger boats already hanging off them and they look in reasonable condition and strength…we cant see what is below the water though!. The rain comes again, but with the ‘sitter-outer’ (a Peterhead name for our cockpit cover) up, we settle down with the wind now a good F6 and gusting F7. With some gin and wine on the go, we have a grandstand view of the sailing school boats who are still out and being well shepherded by a small flotilla of rescue boats. They seem to be enjoying themselves hugely despite regular capsizings and dunkings. It is too rough and unpleasant for a dinghy trip ashore and we have plenty of food on board. By 10 and with the light fading, the wind eases and we have a more restful night than we had expected.

We wake up to a glorious morning on the river…

…and after some fresh coffee make our way up to the pretty village of Bono for some more coffee and fresh croissants. The bar only served coffee but she was more than happy to point us to the shop a few doors down and suggested that we could buy our croissants there and bring them back to sit on her bar’s terrace in the sun…brilliant and heart warming local co-operation.

The little town is pretty but we are not quite sure what the two in the sculpture were on about…she seems about to smack him with her haddock…

We catch the last of the ebb (we think) back down the river in order to get the first of the flood back up into the eastern part of the Golfe. The oystermen are up and about after the extended holiday here (feast of the Ascension)…

As we get to the end of our river and make the turn left we realise that the ebb has not finished! This turns out to be more than an inconvenience, as at some places in the stream we are heading backwards, despite going through the water at nearly 7 kts. We try all sorts of places to find a back eddy and finally find some slower water within a biscuit toss of the shore. With one eye on the depth sounder, the other on the log (speed) and a third on any convenient transit, we make our way grindingly slowly to a small bay where we hope to find a place to anchor out of the current. We slip into a little bay between the islands of Gavrinis and Ile Longue and anchor within hailing distance of the oystermen. This is torture for Yee Tak as they seemingly shake the cages deliberately as if to taunt her…

After a leisurely lunch we catch the now favourable tide back into the heart of the Golfe. We have a glorious sail through the islands and in no time we are searching for an anchorage off the northern tip of Ile aux Moines.

The areas marked as anchorages seem now to be laid with mooring buoys and we pick up a vacant one marked with a V (for Visiteur we hope).

We trundle ashore in search of some cool beer, where the capitainerie young lady tells us we can have a pontoon berth with water and electricity for the same price….it is virtually empty and so we move Heydays we hope for the last time tonight.

The stream is now rushing through the narrows even faster than at Sandbanks and we watch boats being swept sideways at unconscionable speeds as they try to find the tiny paths of slack water in the countless eddies and whirlpools off the point.

Back on Heydays we eat and drink as the sun goes down over what we feel is a really special place…

Postscript…

We are charging batteries, running the fridge etc when we lose mains power. We check all the trip switches on board, we try other power points, all to no avail. The pontoon opposite however, has power when we ask and so we assume that it is our pontoon which has lost power. Despite being nicely melow and full, we up sticks and move Heydays to the next pontoon. This is a pain, but at least we’ll have ice! We plug in but get the same dispiriting result. The boat next to us is plugged in and there is no-one on board so we unplug and try theirs. Eureka. Problem must be with us. We are scratching our heads when a helpful local wanders over and says “…have you tried pushing the button?” Oddly, pushing the on switch works! We apologise profusely and make ‘aren’t we stupid’ gestures with our hands. He shakes his head sadly and returns to his family and booze…

The currents around the Gulf are very strong and the pilot books all warn about the dangers of being swept into places one would rather not be swept. We plan to get through the entrance and up the Auray River on the rising tide and leave our mooring at Le Palais at a respectable hour for a Sunday morning having made one last trip to the market, the boulangerie and the small shop for essentials such as wine and loo rolls.

The day is overcast, but with a steady 8-10kts from just over the port quarter we join what seems like half the French nation out on the water. In some respects this is a bit like the Solent on a bank holiday, but….everyone is sailing. We have mentioned this before, but the French seem not to have fallen under the spell of Sunseekers and penis extensions in the same way that many Brits have. The Solent on a Sunday is not exactly quiet, with big motor boats powering up and down in a hurry to get…where? We like to think of ourselves as an island seafaring nation, but when it comes to sailing the French seem to be much more egalitarian  and, dare we say, less snobbish. There are still lots of young people/couples in small (8-10m) sailing boats. Certainly, moorings and upkeep seem a lot cheaper here compared to the south coast of England. It all seems more akin to the more northern and eastern parts of Scotland…brilliant.

We pass lots of interesting boats on the way over and the wind comes and goes, but it is glorious to be out on the water and exploring places we’ve not been before.

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We dog-leg through the Passage de Teignouse…one of many through the string of rocks and small islands running off from the Quiberon peninsular. We count off the buoys as we get swept into the Gulf proper and on up the Auray river.

We have no real plan other than to anchor somewhere quiet but within a dinghy ride of Auray itself. We sail in company with a couple of other boats up the river in a steadily increasing breeze (gusting 18 kts), but what a brilliant ride. We start to get to narrower bits of the river, but we’re not the first to chicken out and lose the sails!

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In no time we are searching around looking for a quiet spot and finally pick up a vacant mooring buoy near the village of Bono. Only a handful of other boats around, and none seem occupied!

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We decide to take a trip in the tender up to Auray itself and spend a relaxing late afternoon with a few beers and the odd ice-cream and a wander around the lovely old town and its twin St Goustan. 

We catch the start of the ebb back down stream to Heydays in the last of the evening sun.

Bus just across the island to Port Coton. Not really a port in the English sense, more a rocky inlet with some nice beaches which seem only accessible by boat.

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The ruggedness is like that of Cornwall and we spend some time happily walking along the cliffs.

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Some canoeists are threading their way through the rocks…

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…and a presumably local boat does the same. Perhaps he has forward facing sonar as well, not something we would fancy doing without it…

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The main inlet has a few boats already anchored and enjoying the sun, but we watch another trying several times to find some good holding before he is satisfied that he won’t get too acquainted with the rocks.

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While we are waiting for the bus back (with a couple of drinks), the fog rolls in and visibility is down to a few hundred metres and the water and even the rocks which seemed almost friendly a moment ago, suddenly take on a more menacing feel.

Back in Le Palais we have some good views over the inner harbour and small marina…

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…just as a coastal freighter manoeuvres backwards through the lock which seems way too small. Their boat handling skills are impeccable as they slip into their berth with millimetres to spare.

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Le Palais has grown on us and is a great place from which to explore the island…

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Saturday… and after some market shopping for the next few days we take another leisurely bus ride to Sauzon (meaning Saxon port in Breton apparently). We had considered dropping in here by boat but a couple of pilots talked about how crowded it would be with few moorings, hence our stay in Le Palais. In the event there appear to be quite a few vacant places, and the little harbour is a world away from the ‘fleshpots’ of Le Palais.

We are a bit regretful that we didn’t come on Heydays, but we’ve had a great time here and feel like we know the island a little and there is always another time…

Coffee in bed and then another snooze…we finally surface around 10 for some breakfast and then into town for the market. The sun is up and we also learn that there is a regatta in Golfe du Morbihan from Wednesday to Saturday and non-regatta boats are requested to find somewhere else. We decide to stay in Belle Isle for another couple of nights, by which time we hope that a lot of the regatta boats will have cleared out. Belle Isle seems more peaceful today.

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The market is small but an absolute delight…seafood of course, some lovely veg and fruit and a cooked meat stall selling Belle Isle lamb (a delicacy here apparently), some pork knuckle and roast potatoes…Yee Tak and John can’t resist!

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We sit and have a coffee and consider deep cultural questions…or at least, we are grateful that the French have not fallen completely under the spell of the big supermarkets and processed food. This little town supports a market every day, not like the farmers market in Dorchester only once a month. Bread is still being baked twice daily and people think nothing of doing a daily and maybe twice daily shop.

By the time we get back to Heydays we have a few more boats around us, but we are still hopeful for some peace and quiet.

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Lunch is a feast from the market….fresh salad, a wonderful array of different tomatoes, smoked salmon, fish skewers in curry sauce, half a dozen oysters each, some prawns, a huge spider crab (luckily we bought a big crab pot years ago!) and of course the lamb, pork and roast potatoes…

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By the time we get round to tackling the crab we have a full raft of boats strung out along side us…and yet they keep coming. The young men and women from the capitainerie (harbourmaster) are buzzing round, taking lines, directing people to slots and generally helping to avoid mishaps and mess with so many bits of rope hanging around. Good job we are not planning to leave anytime soon.

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Tomorrow we plan to spend some time looking round the island, maybe some walking and a bus ride or two…after our crepes ashore tonight if we can get there.

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We plan to get to Belle Isle somewhere around 3pm which means a leisurely start with breakfast and showers even thought the day is grey and overcast.  The little harbour is busy as we take our leave  …

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….and say a fond farewell to Steve. He has a slightly sore head ….which is definitely nothing to do with the red wine and G&T last night. He swears that we spiked his drink! We had a great time on Ile de Groix, the only regret for Yee Tak is that she didn’t get to see the Abalone farm!

We slip out into a steady 10kt of wind on a beam reach and soon Heydays is scudding across the light swell. The only thing to dampen our spirits is the fine drizzle which from time to time sends us scurrying below for the waterproofs, only to leave us hot and bothered again as the cloud passes and we have some more sun. We barely have to touch the sails, just a fiddle here and there and Heydays spends the next 4 hours at a steady 6 to 6.5 kts. This does not often happen when sailin g and we make the most of the glorious wind. As we close the island the wind builds and we have a steady 18kts with Heydays skimming along at over 7.5kts. All to soon thought we have to think about losing sail and making our final approach into the tiny harbour of La Palais which is the Island’s capital.

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The pilots warn about the movement of boats in the harbour and a ferry dashes in before us just as a small freighter leaves.

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We are met at the harbour entrance by a young woman in a rib who gives us instructions about mooring between a bow buoy and the harbour wall. We have the long line ready and she is so amazingly proficient at handling her boat and  the lines that we are soon moored securely and thinking about dinner. We watch a couple of other boats come in who clearly don’t have long enough lines and are simply not either prepared or aware of what needs to be done. We try not to be smug, as we will also make a hash of things in some other harbour before long…still….!

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The Dutch guy on the boat next to us watches in frustration as a French boat scrapes along his side and nearly T-Bones the harbour wall. “That is why they keep losing to you” he shouts none to quietly to us as they struggle with bits of rope hastily tied together. Not exactly PC or designed to keep harmony among the remaining 27!

We blow up the tender and trundle ashore in search of some nosh. We quickly realise that the island is much busier and more touristy than Ile de Groix…we need to look around some more before we make a final decision about it, but at the moment its charms are more Skegness than Stromness.

No alarms, no tides to catch….bliss. The only snag on the horizon is a problem with the water cooling on the engine. As we entered with King Cnut yesterday, we started to overheat and have traced the problem back to the sea-water part of the system. For anyone not remotely interested in any technical details, you can skip the next paragraph or so…

We first do the highly skilled tasks of checking the filter…clear; blowing down the inlet from the sea-cock…clear; and running the engine to see if we get a flow…we don’t. The next most obvious issue is the impellor, but had only changed it in the winter. The impellor looks OK and turns over with the engine. With the obvious stuff done it gets a bit more bothering…blockages up stream of the impellor in the bowels of the heat exchanger suggest some expensive bits to be bought…if we can get them.  Oddly though, when we put a hose into the inlet from the filter, everything works OK and we get good flow out of the exhaust. The conclusion must be some air being sucked in…leaky hoses….cracked filter? In the end the problem turns out to be a tiny perished O ring around the fixing wing nut. Problem solved and the flow would make an old man proud. The little harbour is busy but very pretty…

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On the quay-side we meet an old Scottish guy called Steve (probably our age!) carrying his cat in a bag. He is on the contessa next but one and has sailed with his cat up from Portugal. He and his wife and cat have been down there for 6 months and now the time has come to sail back home. In the meantime, the rules on Easyjet have changed and apparently they will no longer take the cat. His wife had to go back to Scotland on her own and so he and his moggy sailed across Biscay together. He said that he was very frightened with some of the seas he met and was glad to be in harbour for a few days to recuperate.

We have a leisurely afternoon and after the showers pass we hire bikes (electric ones for Chris and John and a Tandem for James and Yee Tak) and have a brilliant cycle around the western part of the island…its not big!

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The rain holds off and we convince ourselves that we have burned calories in excess of the entire alcohol consumption for the trip! Yeah right,

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We do some supermarket shopping and return he bikes to get ready for some drinks on deck. We invite Steve and he brings a box of Cab Sauv…plus Susie his cat who has been with him since they left Scotland a year ago.

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Steve has been a marine as well as a joiner/carpenter and lecturer…clearly a good bloke. We spend a brilliant evening glugging wine and swapping ever more wild stories of mountainous seas and heroic adventures. Sailing solo is not for everyone and it clearly takes its toll, but we have found a new friend in Steve and hope to stay in touch over the years….maybe we will get back to Scotland one day.

We dine late on fresh  spaghetti and an anchovy sauce and marvel at the people we have met along the way….and how lucky we are to be able to do this.

Saturday in Benodet was a lazy day for John and James while we wait for Yee Tak and Chris to join us. John spends most of the time wresting with some polyester rope for new gennoa sheets by attempting to splice in some eyes. The instructions are reminiscent of the good old days of Haynes manuals…”just ease the outer cover over until point A reaches point B…”. This roughly translates as “you will need the strength of Hercules to “ease” the outer cover and in the process will collect rope burns and be in need of some expensive therapy at the end.”

By the third attempt however (and a day later) we have some new gennoa sheets with neatly spliced eyes as well as some new mooring warps also with neat eyes. John is on a roll now and any odd bit of rope left lying around is in danger of having a useful eye spliced into it.

Yee Tak and Chris’s journey is straightforward with all connections working…a flight from Southampton to Rennes, a train to Quimper and a taxi to Benodet. By 9pm they are safely on board and glugging some wine. We spend Sunday having a very lazy lunch by the riverside and a snooze in the afternoon….life is tough.

We have decided to take things easy around this wonderful cruising ground and will head for Ile du Groix around 6 hours sail away. An early morning dash to the boulangerie for some spectacular pain aux raisin and some gooey pain aux armandes for breakfast, plus a quick supermarket trip and we are still away from the marina by 9.30.

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We motor out of the river and within 20 minutes we are sailing goosewinged in around 10kt of wind with the motor off for once and peace all around!

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The sail is glorious even if we could do with a bit more wind…we’re in no rush though and as we get to lunchtime, the island appears off the starboard bow. With the mainland on our port side, it is almost as if we are sailing across Christchurch bay to the IoW. We’ve got into a bit of a rut with lunch on board…crushed avocado on bread with ground pepper and a pinch of salt drizzled with extra virgin plus humous and some camembert, all on bread baked fresh this morning….not a bad rut though.

As the afternoon wears on the wind builds and soon we have 20kt over the stern and we are on a bit of a crazy few miles running down to Port Tudy. We pass a small boat sailing  and another yacht closes us motor sailing. We haul down the sails as we approach the harbour and the motor sailer  passes by close ahead as if they are trying to get into harbour ahead of us…grrr, how un-friendly and definitely un-seamanlike.

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They pootle around to get a  berth while we are trying to hold steady in a fresh cross-wind in the harbour. With much shouting they dock and we pull in on the finger next to them. I jump down onto the pontoon with a line to receive a mouthful from a goriila in full sailing gear also on the pontoon fiddling with their lines. James resists the temptation to have a go but mutters about King Cnuts (or similar). We get our lines sorted very efficiently (even though we say so ourselves) and have time to help a french boat who get into a bit of a muddle next to us. Eventually with lots of fenders out and their lines sorted, we sit back in the cockpit sun with some G&T and nibbles. It turns out the gorillas (all the gear and no idea) are Brits…bet the French can’t wait for Brexit if that is how some of our compatriots behave…and are still trying to sort out what to do with their lines, as we in a very shallow (and slightly smug) way cheers very loudly!

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We pay our dues with the harbour master who plays air guitar and informs us that the code for the showers is ACDC…great bloke. A snooze in the late afternoon sun and then we wander around the harbour…

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end up at an Irish themed pub on the quay which is authentically French and does some great crab and a seafood platter. We look forward to spending some time on the island tomorrow.

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