Over the Wall

Tuesday 29 May

We effected our Steve McQueen-style escape from Piriac without attracting unwanted attention, and set sail for the little island of Houat. The pretty bay just outside the harbour is liberally seeded with mooring buoys, but rather exposed to the north-west.  The forecast was for light winds, though, and it’s a charming little place.

We had a gently easterly breeze behind us, which gave the skipper chance to play with his preventer stay. (I think this 20m length of red string is one of his most treasured possessions.) It also gave him yet another reason to dispatch the poor long-suffering Mate to the foredeck and yell confusing and frequently contradictory instructions.

 In the end we got bored with drifting slowly downwind, and turned on the engine. (We had told the charter company to keep the spinnaker. The Skipper has a good grasp of the limits of the Mate’s patience with string.) Anyway, we needed to heat some water and give the fridge a burst of power, as we were going to spend the night on a buoy. There was a spot of navigational confusion, as the current was much stronger than we had calculated from the chart. We found ourselves approaching the wrong bay, wondering dimly why it didn’t look familiar. Like, why had the harbour wall mysteriously disappeared? Oops. At least we’d got the right island. Comfortingly, we weren’t the only ones surprised in that way, from what we could see of other yachts’ manoeuvres.

We’ve got the picking-up-a-buoy thing pretty well sussed now, as long as I remember to yell loudly enough to cloth-ears on the helm. It’s the only time I get to give the orders. (Except on land, of course.) This probably won’t be news to anyone, but if you’re interested, I take a line from the bow cleat and lie on the deck amidships where I’m nearest the water. I don’t try to grab hold of the buoy, but simply push a line, with a bowline on the end, through the ring on top of the buoy. Usually it’s easy enough to grab the end as it comes through, but if the deck is high above the water line (or if the buoy is small) the bowline makes it easy to snare the line with the boathook. Skipper then reverses the boat and I take the line back to the bow. When we’re secure, Skipper usually decides a second line would be a good idea, and goes swimming in his undies to attach same, having forgotten yet again to bring any swimming shorts. He has now gone off this idea (having spotted some startlingly large jellyfish in the area this year) which is a shame as it did give us the chance to show off the luxury hot-and-cold-water shower on the luxury bathing deck of the luxury Dufour, although I’m sure most people would have preferred not to watch.

The dinghy inflating routine was less embarrassing this time, as nobody was close enough to witness our clumsiness, and we paddled across the harbour in search of provisions. After the cheerful chaos of the holiday weekend the French had returned to do another couple of weeks’ work before the long summer holiday, poor things, and everywhere was very quiet. It took us a while to find an open bar or café, but I did eventually track down a cold beer, thankfully.

Downtown Houat

We met an English couple sailing a beautiful old Kentish fishing boat. They were about to return to their holiday house on an island in the Golf du Morbihan. Sigh. One day…

Back on board Nara, I set to work on the supper. It was a beautiful, calm, sunny, evening, but the few other boats on the moorings were taking their leave, one by one. We asked one couple if they were worried about the weather, and they said they thought it might be uncomfortable if the wind backed, as forecast. We persisted in our view that, even if the wind was from the north-west, it was not likely to be strong enough to make life really unpleasant, so we would take the chance. The harbourmaster chugged up alongside in a rib to collect our money. We asked his opinion, and he said there was space available inside the shelter of the harbour wall if we were concerned. There you can either tie up to buoys bow and stern, or with a buoy at one end and a line to the harbour wall at the other. He suggested if we wanted his help we should move straight away – fair enough as it was already evening. I had the distinct impression that, in his view, we would be well-advised to move. We thanked him, but decided to stay put. Was this hubris on our part? Stupidity even? I don’t know why I should have felt uncomfortable about being in a minority of one - it’s not exactly a novel experience for me.

Cheese-eating surrender monkeys

In the event, we were right … and wrong. We spent a comfortable night, with almost no wind. However, by morning such breeze as there was came directly from the west. We slept in the forepeak, but the headroom is very limited so our habit was to leave the cabin door open for air. This meant that the next morning the sun rising in the east came straight in through the open door. This is the trigger factor for the Skipper’s migraines, which last for several weeks once they get a hold. Sure enough, the first headache started later that day. We hadn’t thought to rig any kind of curtain across the companionway, because there was nobody anywhere near so privacy wasn’t an issue. We won’t forget next time though. That turned out to be a serious error.