Further West and a little bit to the South

Our next leg from Saint-Germain-des-Vaux was to Guernsey. We were accompanied by the Tuulis (check out their website). We motored the whole way through the so-called “Race of Alderney”. It’s called like this because of the very strong currents that can occur due to the tide. But we arrived a little bit early and so the Race was not as exciting as we expected.

Shortly before we approached St. Peter-Port which is the main harbour of Guernsey we had a small thunderstorm coming along our way. Wind speeds increased from zero to nearly 40 knots in minutes and decreased shortly after we finished berthing, which went surprisingly well for those conditions.

The marina has a very motivated harbour master. We arrived in the middle of the night at about 3:30 and he instantly came over in his small dinghy and pointed us to the right berth.

Guernsey was the first “country” where we had to clear customs, but it’s a quite easy procedure. You simply have to fill out a form with all your personal and ship data (and list all alcoholic beverages and all vegetables and meat onboard) and then put the form into a postbox when leaving your boat for the first time.

 

The yacht harbour has a sill to keep the water inside at low tide. Tidal differences are quite high.

 

Guernsey was nice to visit but at least St. Peter-Port was not as interesting as we would have liked it to be. For me, the most remarkable thing was the extraordinarily good Burger Menu i ate.

 

We should have stayed for another night to explore the other parts of the island. Instead, we decided to continue Southwest and went back to France to Roscoff due to a very good weather forecast which turned out to be wrong, we had to use the engine most of the way.

Roscoff is a nice little city with stores that have a quite long lunch break, and when we decide to walk to the next supermarket we usually arrive five minutes after the beginning of this. So instead of cooking we went to a creperie and had some crepes and coffee. Afterwards, we went to a marine chandler and got some emergency parachute rockets. We would have liked to buy them before we started our journey, but in Germany you are not allowed to buy these without a special license. In France (and probably everywhere else on the world except Germany) you simply go to the store and buy the stuff.

We stayed in Roscoff for two days and went to the beach both days. The first day it was a nice relaxing stay, the second day it wasn’t, because we arrived at high tide and there was no beach any more.

 

From Roscoff, we had a nice relaxing sail to L’Aber Wrac’h. We had to sail close-hauled again and made really good progress due to the wave patterns. While our french boat that has been built in La Rochelle in the middle of the bay of biscay really struggles to go upwind in the short and steep waves of the baltic sea or the english channel, it works like a charm in those long and even Atlantic waves. We’ve had waves of probably two to three meters and it was a lot more relaxing than sailing against waves of less than one meter on the baltic sea.

The next leg was through the Chanel du Four to the Rade du Brest (Bay of Brest) where we’re at anchor now about four miles south of the city. We went there by dinghy today and explored the city center.

The next step will be crossing the bay of Biscay, and we hope to get nice weather for the whole passage (about 350 miles) in about a week.  It gets quite cold here now at night so we hope to be in the warmer south soon.