We left Concarneau for Lorient on Tuesday, with Trouper making an easy 6 knots in a gentle breeze. Lorient is a huge harbour, behind a narrow entrance and we elected to moor in Port Louis, tucked in on the eastern side of the entrance. There’s a water taxi into the centre of town and we spent a happy day on Wednesday exploring the town. There’s a big sailing exhibition in a building named after Eric tabarly the great Breton sailor who in many ways established offshore sailing, especially short handed in French culture. The museum is adjacent to the enormous submarine pens built during the Nazi occupation. They were essentially a huge maintenance facility for U boats that were engaged in attacking the Altantic convoys resupplying the UK from the US during the battle of the Atlantic. That made their maintenance facilities a bit of a target for Allied air attack. The German solution was to built them with so much concrete that there were effectively indestructible. Reportedly the roofs are over 7m thick steel reinforced concrete. They are very imposing structures to this day. After the war the French Navy took the site over and used it to support their submarine fleet during the cold war. In the 1990’s they moved out and the area was redeveloped with the pens becoming homes to a number of marine industries and a centre for the construction and maintenance of extreme high performance composite (mainly carbon fibre) structures. Now it is home to many of the most famous French offshore sailing teams.
As we approached the back of the submarine pens we came across a canteen style cafe with a queue beginning to form at midday in the ground floor of a nondescript commercial building surrounded by industrial units. The portions were huge, the prices very fair (about 25 euros for two with hot drinks) and the food was excellent. As we munched through our lasagne and green salad the queue grew and the t shirts on display became the who’s who of high end composites manufacture and offshore racing team. Nearly half, of the now extensive, queue had IMOCA class logos on their tops. It was a nice bustling place where people had convivial lunches together. We visited the museum, and then walked down onto the public access pontoons where most of the IMOCAs had departed that morning for England and the Fastnet Race. The race runs from Cowes to the Fastnet Rock off South Western Ireland, and then back to Cherbourg (these days, it used to finish in Plymouth, but was moved to accommodate the every larger number of entrants – over 400 this year). The race runs every two years and this is its centenary edition.
Charal remained with some work going on on her rudders, and we’ve been following her since on Marine Traffic – she left on Friday morning and by Saturday morning had been hanging around going in circles at 2 knots just south of the Needles Channel for some time – clearly waiting to take the tide up the Solent, start the race, and charge back out again on the west going tide. Fastnet starts are timed to get the west going tide at the Needles. For me the challenge was always if we’d carry the fair tide to Portland on the first night, or get stuck trapped by a foul tide at Portland Bill. If you thought you weren’t going to make it, and were beating into a south westerly (the prevailing wind) the tidal strategy was to get offshore, often almost to Alderney, to avoid the foul tide and the tidal gate. But that would mean giving up the acceleration from the fair tide over St. Albans ledge that can easily put you an extra mile or so down the track… As I write this on Sunday morning the big mulithulls are approaching the rock and the IMOCAs are passing the Scillies. When I’ve done it on rather slower boats we’d expect to have been somewhere between Start Point and the Lizzard by the first morning, if all was going well. On slow races (2005) by the morning of the third day we were still off the Scillies.
Thursday saw boat admin – some laundry and I cleaned the bilges, which needed it – most boat smells can be tracked down to things lurking in the bilge. We did round the day off with a trip to a local restaurant – which has a Michelin star. the food was very good: three fixed menus, and no a la carte. We had the cheapest, 65 Euro menu and a couple of glasses of very nice wine. With the two amuse bouches there were 5 courses, though the main was too shellfish based for my tastes. Presentation is what you’d expect, and the savoury pea ice cream was exquisite.
From Lorient we headed South East on Friday, mainly motor sailing as we were heading dead downwind in a gentle breeze, until we rounded Quiberon and once through the gap between the off-lying rocks and Ile de Houat we hardened up a bit and had a nice sail in towards Port du Crouesty at he entrance to the Gulf du Morbihan. Whilst I’ve tried not to set deadlines and fix a timetable for this trip in order to luxuriate in the freedom of the time off – to Kathryn, the inveterate planner’s frustration – the Morbihan has been a target from our earliest research. It’s a bit like Poole Harbour, in that it’s a big harbour with a narrow entrance and islands, but it has much stronger tidal flows, and much more deep navigable water, and many, many more Islands (at least 60, I’m told).
We spent a night in Crouesty, meeting a French friend, we know from London, who has a house nearby, for dinner. It’s vast, congested and industrial, but had a good supermarket. We were allocated a berth rafting on alongside a big, unoccupied, Bavaria on the end of one of the hammerheads. It would have been a 2k walk to the marina office, but the harbour master boats (there are at least three) will act as ferries, and gave me a lift both ways. Dinner was in a restaurant overlooking the entrance to the gulf.
We left on Saturday morning for the entrance to the Gulf, aiming to be there at low water, and to carry the rising tide up the Auray river, on the western arm of the gulf to an anchorage off Le Rocher. We found a spot in a little pool just clear of the moorings and got the hook down and set, with a tripping buoy as I was worried about the possibility of fouling the hook with something on the bottom.
After a few hours, and a turn of the tide, I was confident that we were secure, which was the cue for some locals to tun up on a small mark laying launch and make it clear that we couldn’t anchor there, despite the pilot book’s recommendations. We pulled the anchor up (it hadn’t fouled anything) and Kathryn held us alongside an empty mooring a little further up river whilst I managed to post a mooring line through the eye on it’s top by lying on the side deck at full stretch. A little while later a guy turned up to charge us for the mooring for the night, but who was also concerned that the mooring wasn’t big enough for us (which was one of the reasons I’d anchored in the first place – you never quite know what’s under a mooring buoy). He showed up to a more substantial mooring, adjacent to where I’d anchored in the first place, and helped run the mooring lines from his rib – which at least helped with all the stretching.