The joy of smaller boats …..how much boat do I need.
So we arrived in Brittany…..a bit on the tired and fuzzy side after 40 hours at sea and even longer than that since I slept.
My logbook shows that sometime during the early hours, well before dawn, we passed the Libenter shoal which marks the seaward end of the main channel into L.Aber Wrach and about an hour later I anchored the Frances 26 in about 5 meters of water in a small bay , marked as an anchorage, just to the west of the town’s marina. I don’t remember much else except that later on I was woken by the wash and chug of a diesel engine going past. Even then it was still early by town standards but the shell fishermen were off to work in their chunky workboats and most of them gave me a friendly wave as they headed off to work for the day.
The next couple of days are a bit of a blur now but I do know that I motored upriver, past the marina and river moorings and in fact almost up to the head of navigation off Paluden quay ; I spent a few days there catching up on sleep and going ashore to walk up to the nearest town (Llanilis) for coffee at an excellent cafe and a big hit at the supermarket where I stocked up on food. When I left there I sailed south down the chenal de four , turned east at Ste Matthews point, anchored off Plougonvelin to wait out a tide and then sailed straight up the Gulet de Brest into the Rade de Brest.
At some point I sailed around to the southern arm of the Rade de Brest and scooted east again with a solid westerly force 5 to 6 until we turned the double U bend into the river Aulne and got into shelter there under the high ground below Llandevenec…..for those that don’t know it that’s where the French navy park their retired warships. It was there that I bumped into my small boat nemesis once again ; the small boat and it’s owner that I joke had been stalking me throughout my Frances 26 post refit sea trials. This post and it’s Frances 26 side story is mostly about that little boat and it’s owner because after many years I have, I think, worked out what that boat actually was and it just do happens that one has popped on Ebay this week.
So, here’s the story.
That day, when I swept into the Aulne it was with a fair old wind ‘up the bum’ and on a strongly rising spring flood – thus by the time I got myself organized, sails down and anchored i’d already been pushed upriver towards the curved suspension bridge and given that there was enough water I simply anchored right there. The next day I tried to find the deep water channel in the Aulne that eventually leads to Port Launay ; I failed, partially because my depth sounder didn’t work and partially because I didn’t have a local French chart. Instead of motoring upriver I just ‘shifted my berth’ back down towards the warships and a few anchored yachts and my plan was to take the dinghy ashore and maybe walk up the Abbey that is up on the hill at Llandevenec.
I had a bit of a surprise though because right there among the anchored boats was one that I jokingly thought of as stalking me in that everywhere that i’d been to during my sea trials in the Frances 26 this other boat had turned up or was there already…..Plymouth, Fowey and Falmouth, although i’d never seen or spoken with it’s owner. This day the other boat’s owner was sat in his cockpit having a brew so I thought to range up alongside and have a gam with him : it’s a later story but he told me where the first part of the Aulne deep water channel was and what there was up at Port Launay. This story though is about that little boat and it’s owner and I tell it today as part of this thread because it was the moment when I fully realized that a smaller boat was doing exactly the same job as my (relatively) large and expensive one.
Today, I am pretty sure that that little boat was one of these….which is a Hunter 701…..this is the Ebay boat by the way.
The actual boat was a faded dark blue and the main detail that I remember now was that it had a comically large and seemingly home made windvane self steering gear attached to the transom . As you can guess we joked a bit about turning up in the same places several times plus we;d had very similar channel crossings and , once again, come through the same places just a day or so apart. From talking to the owner I got the impression that he was either separated or divorced, retired and spending most of his summers aboard the little Hunter – in fact on this trip he said that he was going to sail around as much of western and southern Brittany as he could and then either over-winter up at Chateaulin or disappear into the French inland waterways there and slowly motor across central France and right down to the south coast in easy stages.
I don’t know why not but iv’e never thought of France as having inland waterways like the UK does but apparently it’s possible to motor from the north Brittany and Normandy coasts all the way down to the Mediterranean and to winter in places like the Canal du Midi which at that time i’d barely even knew the name of. Below is one of the inland waterway access points at Chateaulin – that’s the river lock on the left.
Back to the little Hunter and it’s owner though.
Having already seen the little blue Hunter is several ports and rivers on England’s south west coast i’d assumed that he was a capable coastal cruiser although I was a bit surprised when he turned up in western Brittany and even more surprised to learn that he spent most of his time aboard and seemed to be perfectly content to do so. As I said, I got the impression that he was both separated/single and retired, didn’t have much cash to throw around but that he enjoyed travelling aboard his boat.
In my own case I was beginning to think at the time that the ‘small’ Frances 26 was unnecessarily large (and complex) for what I was doing and that it had cost me far too much time, effort and hard cash to restore and refit. While that boat I believe was fully capable of taking on long offshore and ocean passages I also felt that it was ‘too much boat’ for what I did most of the time – which was cruising around the south west coat and making the occasional channel crossing. It was a bit of a shock to come to the simple realization that I could have been right here, in this place, years before had I chosen to start with a smaller, simpler and lower budget boat. In a way this is the moment that I realized that I had taken the wrong direction (for me that is) so this post is a kind-of bridging post that takes this thread from me owning a ‘large’ and expensive yacht to owning smaller and simpler craft.
In the post that follows this one I talk about what happened when I got back to the UK and ultimately sold the Frances 26 because our lives (me and partner’s lives) changed in that we put everything we had into buying a small Cornish miners cottage between us and I had a couple of years of not owning a boat at all. In my next post ‘released from treatment’ I start to think about the many small boat projects that would let me get back on the water and enjoy myself at much lower cost and with a boat that , in a way, would be much more capable than the deep draft Frances. The eventual outcome of that 2 year exercise was in buying the little Hunter Liberty but before that I looked at and costed-out several ‘project’ boats like this one that I feature today.
Something I learned in France and then learned to look for back in the UK was that many boaters were giving up sailing and either selling or abandoning their boats. In England I found that the place to look was the selling site Ebay and over the years iv’e seen many viable project boats where, for various reasons. a boat owner has simply had to stop owning and running a boat. Just recently there were three complete and decent looking yachts ranging from a 24 foot cruiser-racer, up through a well respected 26 foot boat (Sadler 26) to a 30 foot cruising yacht…..all for very low start-up costs. Iv’e often thought about going down that route and in my blog often talked about the one boat (Achilles 24) which, in it’s triple keel layout, would have been a good boat for me.
When I started to think about a future boat project for myself I began with the idea that there might be an ideal size to start with – I thought this to be about 23 feet but that cost would be important and that features that I had overlooked before would be critically important. Although a bit nebulous at the time I was working towards a tighter definition of the boat that would work best for me and for example that shallow draft or variable draft and then the ability to dry out flat and level would let me get into the kind of places that I couldn’t (as easily) with the ‘big’ Frances…..in short it was my thinking that was changing and all because an older and retired sailor showed me quite accidentally that it could all be done with a smaller and simpler boat and on a much leaner budget.
Today, I note that the bids on the little Hunter are around £60 and I assume that will go up a bit – there are 3 bids as I write and if it was me bidding I would set myself a top limit of around £500 and I reckon I would need to spend say a thousand pounds to bring it up to scratch…..that’s me though and i’m an awful boat snob !
Anyway…..here’s the link to the actual boat .
It needs sorting out but I could have that emptied out, cleaned and tidied in a day or a weekend at worst.
Dirty Wet Dog, the great adventure. 