Groix to St Martin

Getting here

Well, this has been a really odd trip in that it felt as though it was over before it began and the middle bit is like one of those dreams that you would really like to fall back into. After a really prompt launch, the time in PLF expanded to fill the weather – cold and often wet. Then we got started. Then Al got THE CALL – an offer he couldn’t refuse, so we put ourselves in serious delivery mode (5 knots under sail or else the engine goes on) and left Groix as soon as the wind dropped away from the enthusiastic F5-7 it had been blowing for the last 3 days. Not an early start since our destination (Belle Ile) could only be entered a couple of hours before high water.
An uneventful but really enjoyable sail of just under 30 Miles (nautical ones, that is) with one reef in the main and the number 2 jib and steady NE 3-4s with a fairly flat sea ( I think it was what the French call ‘peu agitee’ (apologies for missing accents)). For landlubbers I can only say this is just about nearly as good as it gets. If I manage to get the visual aid up, you’ll see that our course was SE.
We arrived at the offing (a nautical term; get used to it) of Le Palais at around 1930. It is a picture-poscard town – at a distance – nestling under the angular wings of a Vaubon Fort. The outer harbour is bumpy in Northerlies and there’s also a cunning arrangement of buoys that mean you have to pick up fore and aft. We haven’t yet worked out how to do this, so thought we’d go for a quiet night in the inner harbour – protected by a gate and swing bridge. We turned up in the outer harbour at the appointed hour, only to be met by a rough looking harbour irk in a rib (Rigid Inflatable Boat) clutching a hand-held VHF radio and telling us to come back in 15 minutes. An hour of bashing about, burning diesel, alternately playing dodgems and musical chairs with other boats, and we were in. (A couple of coasters were in the way, hence the wait. Working boats come first.) The same faintly unpleasant bloke directed us to a parking space (yes, a berth) just about as long as us, necessitating a bit of jiggling around with lines to get us neatly in (we used to just crash about a bit and hope for the best, but we’re a lot better behaved these days). Only slight embarrassment: Me to woman on pontoon ‘ You can let that line go now, it’s not ours’. She: ‘No, it’s ours’. (I didn’t ask why she was holding on to it as if her life depended on it …)
There is an odd feeling about Le Palais – the harbour staff are kind of casual to the point of being rude, and the whole quay has a kind of rough feeling – and not in a good way. This feeling seriously came home that night when around midnight lots of alcohol started getting its wind up and having a good shout, scream, hysterical laugh and more shouting whilst apparently falling over empty oil drums. This went on until around 4, in waves as successive clubs & dives chucked out. I am usually quite calm about party noise but this time I couldn’t have murdered the vessels of drink personally, but I think I could have gone along with it. (Is this middle age sweeping by like a buoy in a channel?)
Maybe the bad feelings around Belle Ile are to do with its popularity as a holiday home island with Parisiennes, who have probably been scooping up the best houses for decades, employing the locals as builders and caretakers, leaving them dispossessed, and generally out of sorts - a bit like Cornwall.
Next day brought a welcome escape from the torturers of the night and a motor-sail to Yeu, 50 Miles away. I’m afraid we could only make 3-4 Knots without the motor, and we’d already decided that we needed to get Al into La Rochelle for a flight on Tuesday, giving us Monday to sort things out with the harbourmaster there, persuading him to find a safe place to leave Snork Maiden.
Yeu brought a fresh disaster. Getting in was OK (remember last time?) apart from my kicking the gear leaver inadvertently forward after a very slick manoeuvre alongside another boat. Lot’s of shouts of ‘en arriere’ quickly fixed that. That wasn’t the disaster. The disaster happened in a pizza place (no time or inclination to cook, already past 2100 and we have a long day tomorrow). As some of you know, we have a cute little waterproof, shockproof camera (the Olympus Mu, Tough version). Unfortunately it’s not idiot-proof, and in a rush of enthusiasm I deleted all of Al’s favourite pictures, taken on Yeu. What could I say – it was a time for abject boot-licking apology. Al is amazing, he really doesn’t carry a grudge – but I know he grieves for the pictures. He says he went through them all, and so he at least had a bit more of a mind imprint of what we had seen. I did save the movies. (Actually, that was sort of the problem; and it’s not really true about the grudge – he does have it in for my poor old 6 year old Powerbook, creaking away with Mac 10.3. If iTunes hadn’t been so slow this would never have happened.)
Next: we sail from Yeu to St Martin and have a very bumpy night.