St. Quay Portieux to Camaret - Take1

Thursday 21st August 2008
We slipped the lines at Thursday morning around 06:00 and made our way to the fuel pontoon to fill up. All went smoothly without any problems (except me getting splashed with diesel – damn that breather in the cockpit!) and an hour later saw us heading out with smooth seas and wind around F3.

We actually started to struggle for wind and christened the new Genoa pole.

After around 2 hours we reached the beginning of the exposed coastline and the waves were starting to appear as long rolling swell, much bigger than I have ever seen in the Channel around Brighton. As they were rolling they were large but easy enough to sail over. It is quite an experience actually sailing up the face of a wave!

Slowly, the wind started to fill in from the West, exactly the direction from which we needed to go (again!). An hour later saw us under mainsail and reefed Genoa with wind building to F4/F5 with the waves steadily growing to around 3m, we were now about 6nm off course (out to sea) due to the direction of the wind. While conditions were a little scary to start with (inexperience showing), we were in no danger, accept of being uncomfortable and not actually enjoying the sail.

The conditions meant that the boat speed had to be minimised to prevent actually shooting off the top of the waves which resulted in very loud and scary ‘slams’ that juddered throughout the entire boat. My biggest worry was of losing the mast, again with the Steve (The Rigging Guy’s) words repeating in my head – ‘The Rig looks a bit loose’. I had to manually helm the boat to avoid the waves and this was very tiring concentrating for hours on end. The steep seas were a result (I’m guessing) of the westerly wind against the strong west going French tide, a classic dangerous scenario.

We continued for another 40nm before making the reluctant decision (after 2 hrs of discussions) to turn back. One of the problems with this stretch of coast is that there are no 24hr ‘Port of Refuges’ between St. Quay Portrieux and L’Aber Wbrach (only approx 20nm short of Camaret our intended destination) and what harbours there are, are drying and not accessible during all states of the tide and a nightmare to navigate to in the dark being surrounded by rocks etc. While, we were not in danger I felt that I wouldn’t be able to sustain 24 hours of helming especially in the dark, in addition I had not been able to leave the helm to go to the toilet and eat etc.. The boat was more capable than its crew.

The journey home was equally as uncomfortable as the waves were now from directly behind but at least the boat was no longer ‘slamming’.

We were regularly surfing over 10 knots down (see top left on pic below) the wave faces with the highest speed being seen at over 13 knots!

Again manual helming was required and by now I was quite tired and it was just starting to get dark. For some reason in the pics and video the sea state looks calm and the waves look tiny - Yeah right! You had to be there!

Eventually we got back around the headland where the waves subsided and the motor went on. I also had the chance to get some Corned Beef Curry down my neck and hand over the helm to Daz for a while. Somewhere along the way we lost the portside nav-light, so I continued to motor using the tricolour instead. I know this is against the ColRegs but I thought it better to be seen from all sides as a sailing vessel than not be seen at all as a vessel under motor from the portside. Of course any real skipper would have spare emergency nav-lights.

We finally got back to St. Quay Portrieux at around 5am only to find it completely full, with our only option to moor ‘alongside’ a massive yacht in the main marina entrance. Finally tied up we crashed, however, it was very difficult to sleep with the wash from the boats (including the fishing boats) coming and going directly past us.

In conclusion, we had just clocked up over 100nm and not got any further forward, mainly due to the weather forecast being wrong, although to be fair, at no point did we have overly strongwinds, just a horrible sea state. I did however learn a lot about rough weather sailing. The only way to get comfortable with and learn how to cope with and handle heavy weather is to get out there and witness it, preferably in someone else’s boat!

Another point is that all the books teach you about ‘Heaving to’ and using ‘Storm Tactics’ but these do not apply when you simply do not have the sea room or time to simply sit and wait for conditions to improve such as when coastal sailing. The northern French coast has tides that run like trains and it becomes priority to simply ‘get somewhere’.