Isle de Groix and La Trinite – South Brittany, July 2006

It’s  11.00pm  - we are sitting in a bar overlooking the harbour at La Trinite-sur-mer, the start of many multihull races French style – big and fast. It’s close to Carnac, famous for its stone formations related to those at Stonehenge. The books tell us that the water is warm and the clearest around. Well, we wouldn’t know yet, as the visibility for the 30 mile trip today never exceeded 1 mile with drizzle and fog. As we arrived it started to clear and tomorrow promises to be much better – apparently it was 32-36 degrees here for the 2 weeks before we arrived!
We went off exploring this evening on our fold-up bikes, as the waterfront restaurants were crammed with tourists. We headed out of town and stumbled across a shellfish&crustacean processing factory with a restaurant above. Laid back atmosphere, lovely views, and of course fantastic fresh cheap seafood.  What a find! It’s called Aquaculture Jaouen- just over the bridge above the marina.
The marinas are getting more expensive as we head south – so we will have to start searching out anchorages again. As the weather (hopefully) improves this is not a chore, but an opportunity to stay away from the crowds.

Yesterday we had the best sail yet – force 5-6 from the quarter propelled us along at 7.5 knots all the way – with the tide to help. Big swell from the fronts that have come through, so quite rolly. We lost a shower bag over the side, because it wasn’t tied on. We had chilli and fresh baked bread for lunch on route – yum yum.

The day finished at Isle Groix, Port Tudy. Pictures in the pilot book show it as a quiet little port – busy in season. They weren’t kidding. Two harbourmasters led us into a downwind trap and pointed us to 2 boats that appeared to be tied together. One pushed our bow with his boat and the other pushed the 2 boats apart. Fenders deployed we motored forward and forced them apart to nestle quite comfortably between them. Virtually all French yachts on holiday – a bit like Yarmouth on a busy day only more tightly packed. The difference was that they had all gone to bed by midnight – no noisy parties, and no-one stirred until 09.00 the next morning. The French know about taking sailing at a holiday pace!
Fortunately the ferry driver knew what he was doing, reversing off the quay and turning around to leave the port within a few feet of the moored yachts in very gusty conditions.

Better a bad day on the water, than a good day in the office…..July 2006

Moved aboard – with our worldly goods waiting to be stowed.

Hopefully the last crossing of the English Channel reminded us of what the English Channel can provide. Within 2 hours we were surrounded by an electrical/thunder storm of proportions we have rarely seen up-close to date. We expect to see more and worse, but it was enough to remind us to head for warmer climes.
Numerous sheets of lightening and forks danced around the flattened sea. Visibility ahead reduced to zero, and the rain fired into the sea as if from a fire-hose above us. We saw the storm on the radar screen as a big black horse-shoe cloud approaching us, but it was too late to avoid it, so we headed for the narrowest point and put the VHF and GPS in the oven (supposedly a faraday cage – but no-one is sure if this helps!).
We thought that being hit by lightening would not be an auspicious start to our adventures, but it had an element of excitement!

We heard the same day that possibly the same storm hit our home yacht club at Poole. One strike hit a racing dinghy on the water, and another hit the race hut taking out the electronics. Perhaps we were in the right place at the right time, but it does seem that lightening doesn’t automatically seek out the tallest metal pole in the vicinity as we are all taught to believe.

English weather, and what a thunderstorm looks like on radar.

The rest of the trip was mundane, across the shipping channels and nearing Alderney Stuart caught a glimpse of a whale (possibly a minke) and a basking shark, but Steph thinks he was hallucinating.

Alderney - yuk

Another rolly night at anchor in Braye harbour, Alderney, saw us heading off early to St Peter Port, Guernsey. A comfortable sail and anchoring in the bay south of the marina (Havelet bay), provided a gentle rolling home for the evening. Everything was shut except the hospitable Guernsey Yacht club, which suited us just fine.  Monday morning and time for a last quick stock-up from M&S. Some spare oil from the engineers and we were on our way in a flat calm for Treguier, on the North Brittany coast.
Treguier entrance is a long straight approach down a buoyed channel and rewards the weary traveler with a picturesque anchorage under the chateau, just before the marina and delightful village.

Dinner on board with a falling tide, and then a re-anchoring manoeuver at 11.00pm resulted in us discovering a broken throttle cable. We spent a hot sunny morning emptying the huge aft locker for access and 3 hours later the cable was replaced with the last minute spare we had picked up at 4.30pm on the Friday before departure.

A trip to the legendary chandlery in Treguier resulted in the first time that Stuart has not bought anything there – (a sure sign that we are overloaded!) A wonderful meal that evening of wood-fire baked potatoes, salad, chips, lamb kebabs, oysters and crème caramel for 13euros.  Excellent value, if you could overcome your prejudices about restaurants with pictures everywhere of St Bernard dogs – Well it was called the Restaurant St Bernard!
Wednesday, 07.30 departure after Stu had a quick dip to clear the propeller of weed. Followed by 18 hours of motoring in no wind, albeit plenty of fog.
Chanel du Four  - visibility 30-100meters, wet and chilly at midnight. Despite an aversion to relying on GPS (satellite navigation) it was a delight to have it help us along with the radar through this famous passage, renowned for strong tides and big swells. Steph faultlessly navigated blindly from the chart table and Stu steered as directed peering out into the gloom and intently watching the radar.
We arrived Camaret at 02:00 and anchored outside the harbour for a well-deserved sleep.

In the morning we moved to the marina for fuel and water. Diesel was a shock at 1.3euros per litre – twice the price of the UK. No duty free red diesel for yotties here from now on.
In the only internet café in town we met up with Paul and Val from Brighton on a diversion from a passage to La Coruna, on their racy Sigma 400 ‘Intemperance’. With these two, we have met our match in the ‘drinking under the table’ challenge. It was touch and go for a time, but I think we saw them off at about 04:00 after they finished our secret weapon – a bottle of Thai rum!
The trouble with marinas, is that once in, you can’t leave – first the hangover, then a forecast, then the rain, the company, the lure of cafes, restaurants and an internet café.
So we didn’t leave until 3 days later, after paying our bill for our first mooring costs (75euros for 3 nights).

Chenal du Four – a better day dawns

Raz du Sein

Next stop, after a gentle motor through the infamous Raz du Sein (pah – we’ve seen more tide and whirlpools in Poole Harbour entrance!) Bright blue sea, sky and bright sun, although a bit of a chilly air, lunch in the cockpit, followed by a lovely sail. We decided to make the most of the wind and continued to Benodet, South Brittany.
Lovely town, if a bit twee, and a little over-hyped by the pilot guides. We walked round and through it 3 times before believing we had seen it all. We found a convenient visitors mooring buoy at 20 euros per night ( next to the marina at 30E per night).
On Monday we attempted a cycle. We took the fold up bikes ashore in the dinghy and set off for historic Quimper. After a 5km ride along the busy main road we decided to take a break at a tiny restaurant/tabac. Steph’s crap French resulted in a full-on menu (9E for 4 courses) instead of a quick snack. This fortunately included a very large bottle of wine, as very soon the heavens opened and the trip to Quimper didn’t seem so inviting anymore.
After stuffing ourselves on the best meal so far, we decided to venture out in-between rain showers to try and find a track along the ‘most beautiful river in Brittany’. We found one track with a warning of roches glissantes. We thought this was just the job and set off along the high tide mark, with several intrepid French ramblers. They weren’t joking about the slippery rocks, there was also slippery sand, slippery gravel, stinky mud, and seaweed and bitey things if you stood still, and also more rain.

Benodet

Another 5km in a direction away from the boat we found a small village (closed) and a main road back to where we started.
Defeated and soaked, we packed the foldups away in more rain, and took them back to the boat, balanced precariously on top of the dinghy.
Back ashore for a hot shower, followed by enormous and delicious crepes at the aptly named Creperie de Benodet, we finished our evening at a harbourside bar regarding the sea through misty plastic windows.
Clearly we need to hurry further south to escape the clutches of the English summer!

PS – Just one internet café to date – don’t feel neglected if you haven’t received an email!

Preparations, June 2006

If only Poole harbour always looked like this!

Someone asked us to write down what we did to prepare for the trip, what was useful and what was not – this is what we think so far….


We started sailing a 17’ wooden Lysander that took 7 hours to reach the pub if you got the tides wrong. We learned a lot about epoxy -  I  learned about thinners, having spent the day upside down under the yacht with a pot of epoxy dripping up my arms the wrong way – then finding that Stuart didn’t have the thinners/cleaners – so I just had to strip my skin off with the epoxy attached.

We raced a great big overpowered Osprey sailing dinghy together  - taught us how to sail (and race) through too much wind without an option to reef the main….

We sailed a 24’ plastic fantastic Beneteau. Great boats, but not comfortable IMHO. Even in the English Channel I didn’t feel safe, even though smaller heavy displacement  boats were happy to cross when we stayed in port. However it taught us what to do when we were overpowered and in seas that didn’t feel comfortable, and when to leave the boat behind and get the ferry to be at work on time on Monday morning.

We sailed a 32’ heavy displacement Sovereign. Like most yachts with a long keel, it did not go astern in a predictable fashion. This yacht taught us to assess every berthing situation carefully with a view to an escape plan, and taking all factors (tide, forecast, berth position) into account. The boat was not so heavy that we could not get ourselves out of the poo when we got it wrong. It was funny however, to be instructed by a young harbourmaster in St Malo on how to exit the long run of pontoon berths under the Old City, in reverse. We did as he said (didn’t have much choice) to much hand-wringing, exasperation, and fending off – he had clearly been brought up on plastic fantastics.

We cut our teeth on situations experienced on these boats, before coming to own and operate a Rival 41; I’m not saying we haven’t made mistakes since then, as you can see – but we are willing to learn from our mistakes in the hope that we will be prepared for when we do them again!

Oooops!

More experiences:
We spent our winter months doing the Dayskipper, Yachtmaster, and Ocean Master(whatever the equivalent is now) shorebased exams. The Yachtmaster we even repeated, as we thought we needed an update. Unfortunately after many years the RYA still hadn’t brought it up to date with some good GPS questions. I’m sure they’ll catch up eventually. The teacher must have been the only one in class not to own a GPS!
The Ocean-master was fascinating, although completely obsessed with celestial navigation (which I admit I found extremely absorbing) at the expense of spending a bit of time discussing the practical aspects of planning an ocean voyage – for example, knowing how much beer to take….

Other more recent courses we decided to take:

Steph – I did the Short Range VHF cert with GMDSS to understand how to ask for help, especially when you need to turn off the red button after someone’s charming child has activated it for you.
Steph – I then did the Long range cert, as we have an SSB on board and need to know what it does – seems really useful for information nets about local places, transmitting to vessels in a wide radius, and with email software and modem can transmit your yachtblog worldwide given the right conditions.

Stu – did the Ships Captains Medical Course – which was incredibly useful for me so that he has a chance of saving me in unfortunate circumstances.  I did not do the course, as it was quite expensive (though I don’t debate worthwhile) and I have Accident and Emergency experience and can read the Ships Captains Medical Guide and understand what it means. The qualification means that Stuart ( as skipper) can obtain medicines chest that would otherwise require the prescription (and therefore, the payment) of a local doctor, and can communicate effectively with a Cruise ship or Navy vessel as to what medicines we carry on board.

We both did the Sea Survival and ISAF/Offshore Crew course at KTY yachting in Warsash.  Since going on this course, I don’t believe anyone should buy a liferaft without taking the sea-survival course. Even in a swimming pool we learned the effectiveness of a life jacket without a spray hood, and immediately paid over our pennies for the upgrade. IMHO if you haven’t practiced getting into a liferaft in  a swimming pool, you would be very lucky to survive a hostile situation – injured crew, overturned liferaft, you need a well equipped, well thought-out grab-bag to consider survival –the whole course gave food for thought, but the second day gave us an opportunity to see how inadequate our provisions would be for cutting down the rig if dismasted, for surviving in a liferaft without prior planning, right mental attitude, basic knowledge of emergency first-aid – and much more….well worth the money and time…


And now we feel totally unprepared for what is to come …..….

Preparing to depart, June 2006

Matador of Hamble; prior to purchase in a neglected mud-berth in the Solent

Our thoughts on choosing the right boat….
After a few years of sailing with Stuart, we were experimenting with channel crossing and Normandy holidays on board our Beneteau First 24. After a particularly boisterous channel crossing (we’d already left the boat there once and got the ferry home, to return the following weekend) which featured me opening the anchor locker lid to sit inside the well in order to drop the foresail (no roller furling!) we started to read books about blue water sailing. We soon made the assumption that blue-water sailing was something very rare and mostly only done by people who wrote books about it.  A chance encounter with a couple who had sailed from New Zealand in a 36ish foot boat, at our yacht club, changed our perspective about what can be achieved with the right mind-set. They introduced us to the concept of ‘living-the-dream’.

I think at the time, we were reading Geoff Pack’s Blue Water Countdown – and this set us seeking the holy grail of owning a heavy displacement 30+ footer. Countless trips to second-hand boat shows and boat yards around the south ensued between sailing trips when the weather was too exciting for the two of us on the Beneteau.

We had set our hearts and minds on a Nicholson 32, and following a disastrous attempt to buy one that the surveyor claimed to be uninsurable, we went to Kings Yacht Agency.
There, Richard Seymour did what proper brokers do, showed us photos of a yacht on his books that he had taken the trouble to visit in Dartmouth. It was a Sovereign 32 – we’d never heard of it, but he had all the supporting documentation and reviews from yachting magazines to convince us it was worth the trip to view it.
Anyway – we bought it and never regretted it once.  It was a beautiful boat, and it looked after us so well in numerous situations where a plastic fantastic would have been scary.
This included the delivery trip home in November, after a week of nasty SEasterlies, we emerged from the marina in Dartmouth, put the sails up for the first time, and pounded our way through the waves all the way across Lyme Bay home to Poole, most of the 15 hours spent in the dark sheltering behind the spray-hood in 5 layers of fleecy clothes and waterproofs to stave off hypothermia. We had never owned a diesel engined boat before so the whole trip was a learning curve.
Our subsequent sailing to Normandy, Brittany and the West Country convinced us that a heavy displacement yacht was what provided our particular security blanket.  Unfortunately we realised that we were going to outgrow the confines of a 32’ yacht. There was no separate aft cabin, and the yacht would need a lot of work to make it ‘ocean-ready’. We decided that any further work that we did to the Sovereign would not reap us any benefit financially or for future plans. So we decided to market it and go for something that we would feel comfortable to go further offshore on.
This was a difficult time. There was not much on the market in the realistic budget that suited our needs.
We looked at heaps of boats, and eventually returned to Richard Seymour at Kings Yacht Agency. We were subsequently persuaded to re-visit a boat that Stuart had spotted (and excluded) in Southampton in a sad mud-berth, apparently the pride and joy of a couple at one time, but now deserted and rotting and appearing to be unloved. It had peeling varnish outside and in. Broken toe-rail and spinnaker pole lying on deck. Further excursions into the interior cupboards revealed a spiders’ nest of wiring and plumbing – dead, overheating batteries, decks leaking into rotten cupboards leaking onto expensive Alcantara upholstery. The engine was awash in its separate bilge surrounded by sludge of its own juices including diesel, oil, saltwater and corrosion.

We might have been mad, or deluded, but we thought it had potential, and bought it for what we think (!) was a fair price.  We bought Matador (of Hamble) home to Poole to refit the worst of the damage, and like a garden we felt it was best to wait 6 months to see what you really need to do.
Our first cruise quickly followed after delivering the Sovereign 32 to Wales for her new owner. Our plan to cautiously sail the west-country in our untried new vessel on safety grounds was scuppered by more forecasts of strong westerlies. After a week of beating through them the previous week, and much deliberation we headed 90 degrees left and went to France – were the sun always shines – at least more than it does in the UK!
Two weeks of sailing the worst tides and rocky shores of N Brittany interspersed with repairs and surprises, an intermittent depth sounder, and finds such as a single-clipped rusty jubilee clips on improvised plumbing attached to seized through-hull fittings under the water line, under the floor inside the cupboard, under the galley - made us anxious to return to the UK and start the refit.

Luckily Stuart is handy with most things mechanical, electrical and practical, whereas I am the master of the user manual. When Stuart can’t fix something by taking it apart, I read the manual and give him divine inspiration (let’s face it – he wouldn’t admit it was anything less!).  So we mostly avoid the exorbitant costs of asking someone else to do the work for us, but always take (and pay for) the advice of experts who are willing to spend their time giving it. This, we believe makes cruising more affordable to us, than to others, who may assume that they do not have sufficient skills. We also believe that this ethos goes hand-in-hand with a sustainable cruising life- but time will tell.



Now we are ready to roll. Well almost.
We have done the deed of selling Stuarts thriving business to the right buyer – this was the defining moment in our lives, when we finally had a real opportunity to give cruising a go. I could hardly say that my (no less important and satisfying) job in the NHS was going to stop us going cruising, so the next step was resignation – doesn’t that sound terrible- but none the less, the drive and commitment was what I have known my entire working life, and have built a career around.  Somewhat career suicide- handing in one’s notice, hoping the cruising life really will happen in a few months, but once done, easily reconciled as the right thing to do – as it happens the NHS seems to be falling apart around me since I left, but I fancy this is more an unhappy co-incidence than anything to do with me.

Anyway – working life moves on without us, without too much trouble.
We continue to try and sell our life’s possessions for more than 50pence per part. Car boot sales are a real trial to your patience and self-worth. We both know that we could earn more by going to work and fly-tipping the whole lot, even given that we might be caught and fined. But somehow one needs to feel that your last 30 years of Christmas presents and purchases have gone to someone who really appreciates them for the 50p (or less) that they were prepared to pay after bartering for half an hour.

Somehow, it all seems worthwhile, as we have been given a chance to do something that most people only dream of. We continue to try and make our house very attractive to potential long-term tenants, whilst trying to transfer as many belongings as possible to the yacht (or hide them in the shed for the short-term). This was scuppered this weekend, by finding horrible mould growing in all enclosed spaces, so all had to be cleaned before we could start thinking about stowing gear. The previous year we wintered ashore with a dehumidifier and heater – not a sign of a black spore anywhere. This year, afloat in Britain’s fantastic climate we harboured every mould known to man and beast in our lockers.
We're in a hurry to get to sunnier climes.......