Speeding South

Waiting out some gusty wind, up to 7 Beaufort, which would have made it nearly impossible to navigate the narrow channels south of La Rochelle we decided to spend a full day exploring this beautiful city, home to the largest pleasure boat harbour in Europe. Renting bikes to visit the Île de Re we crossed the 3km bridge which we passed under with the Goden Wind the previous day.

In La Rochelle we were also treated to a viewing of Yannick Bestaven’s winning Vendée Globe boat entering the old city harbour and enjoyed hearing some live music from the Francofolies music festival taking place in the city.

Leaving the city in the afternoon to make a turn to the mouth of the Garonne we enjoyed following the narrow channel between the mainland and the Île D’Oleron. Experiencing the incredibly variable bathymetry due to the many sand banks in the area, we were surprised when 7m depth suddenly dropped to 1.8m and we gently slid onto a sandbank.

Luckily we were able to use the engine to maneuver off and now certain that our charts could not be trusted we made way to the buoyed channel and followed it out to the open sea. We enjoyed sailing the last 16nm to Royan riding the current.

Setting off earlier the next morning we said a sad goodbye to Katharina as she helped us take up the mooring lines. When leaving the river we experienced strong currents against us that required us to tack and make very slow progress out of the mouth of the Garonne. However after exiting we made this easy but fairly long trip down the coast, more than 70nm, and we were surprised to see how truly homogenous this long sandy coast of Nouvelle-Aquitaine was.

Arriving at the channel into Arcachon we had fun navigating this changeable basin, which also required us to carefully follow the channel markers and more or less ignore our charts. This made for a fun race with another sailboat into the harbour on a close haul with some tacking.

Making a stop to ideally just pick up our four new crew members, Ina, Karl, Petra and Fabian and continue through the night we set off again just after sunset. Hoping the moonlight would be enough to help us navigate back out we were disappointed when the wind lulled much earlier than forecast. While we were still between the sandbanks with about 3kts of current, we discovered the unlit and unmarked buoys were nearly impossible to spot.

Truly unable to spot the last set of buoys to exit the channel and entering water with only 3m depth, we opted to go for the safer option of following our track back to an anchorage rather than risk running aground and spending the night being hit by swell waiting for the tide to come back in.

Leaving our anchorage half way up the channel with the outgoing tide in the late morning we were very happy to have the daylight and 2m more of depth to much more easily return to the open sea.

With a crew of nine we had an easy time sailing down the coast in the sunshine and into the night. With the wind lulling a little in the night we were happy to have it pick up again from the west around 2:00 in the morning. We were also then treated to a pod of common dolphins racing the boat with trails of glowing plankton.

Arriving in San Sebastian with the rising sun we were all very excited to explore this beautiful city in a natural crescent bay.