IAN STEPHEN’S BRITTANY WEBLOG

Last leg

22 September 2008

We fail to catch a sea-bass en route, trolling slowly as we anchor under sail in the lee of Houat. This is an Island that holds memories for Michel and it’s the perfect stop en route to the Loire. Michel makes a show of throwing the last of the supermarket bread over the side. I’d thought of keeping it till we were in fresh water with ducks on the water. That will be one more day, if we get our calculations right.

We do catch mackerel but Guy has cooked chicken so we leave them for tomorrow. Tomorrow brings a red sunrise and we have good sailing towards St Nazaire. We watch the buoys on the water and see them tilt from one way to the other. It’s the moment of slack water when river current will flow with the wind for a short time. When we’re at the crucial part of the channel, the tide will begin to carry us up. We need to be all these miles up the river for high water, when we can enter the sidewater that will be Bonnie’s last stop this year.

An Aberdeen-registered gas carrier goes up before us. The strong breeze is now making the waters stand as the tide gives us a good 4 to 5 knot push. I’ve been revising lights and shapes shown by different vessels.

I realise the tug at the stern of the Aberdonian is flashing us. One. Starboard. The ship has gone aground and the tug is trying to get the angle that will pull him off. I look again at the electronic chart. There is no water to our starboard side. We have to go decisively to port. But there’s another big ship being towed at the port side of the channel. We slow the motor but it’s coming downstream. Only solution is to give it some revs on the engine Guy has lavished attention on and go hard to port then up the middle between the two.

That’s what we do and it works. Another small boat does the same. The Aberdonian is going nowhere fast, We look astern to see the mud churning. A second tug joins her. This incident of course leads to days of banter. The Scotsmen blocking the river or the piratical French tugs causing havoc to their allies from the north. Every story has different viewpoints.

There are fishing traps at the muddy edges of the channels further upstream. I wonder what they’re catching. I sense the quiet emotion in Michel and Guy, something in the grip on the tiller, the uncoiling of the mooring warps. They are occupied in driving the boat out of the stream into that narrow channel. So I photograph the reception committee. Michel’s family and friends and grandchildren are out in force, waving welcome banners.

The evening and the next few days go by in a blur of delicacies, slow sips of good wine and stories. There is a bottle of local Loire valley wine from 1981. Brought round by a friend whose father made it. Sunday roast and a supper of oysters.

On Monday we drive to the boatyards and flake away sails and prepare the boat for the lift-out. A mate of Michel’s brings a trailer for all the gear. It will be a total clear out. While we wait for the tractor with its hydraulic lifting trailer, we chat to fisherman working the very edge of the channel we navigated. They lift a net from time to time and scoop out shrimps. A rosy man tells us he measures his catch by how many pounds of butter it will take to fry them. That’s about 4 packets worth.

Too late, I think of the mackerel we caught but did not eat. They would have done well for bait but the boat’s fridge has been off for a day and they’re too far gone. I feel the weight of our small crime like the chill of late September in the breeze. When Guy phones home via Skype that night he finds it’s 2 degrees below zero in Quebec.

We’re planning the next adventure, in my boat this time, if I can get all the jobs done over the winter. The hospitality continues. We see a mill on another river. Banter with the lock-keeper. She will be Michel and Christiane’s neighbour when they’ve done the renovation.

Michel’s mate of 40 years standing has driven all the boat gear to store here, in the huge building. He brings us back to the converted farm, prepares food for us, shows us how the thousands of trees he planted over 20 years are developing. Talks us through the renovations, done with his visiting grandchildren in mind.

I think of the years of building, renovating, maintaining in my own life in my own distant home island. How there came a time when it was all just too much of my life. It’s that chill in the wind again. And yet the next day we’re picking grapes for a few hours at a family run vineyard and eating like lords again and sipping the best products of the Saumur region winery. It’s a bit like bringing the peats home in Lewis. But the regional specialities differ.

The shrimp fishers have told us that yes, sea-bass still come that far on the tide. So we probably had a better chance of catching one within 100 metres of Bonnie’s berth than anywhere along her Breton or Cornish or Irish route.

It’s another subject for the banter that will have to continue by e mail or phone for a while. Till the next one. We might be too far north to have a chance of a bass but I’m told they still catch halibut around the many Faroese islands that Michel and me have still to visit.

© Ian Stephen, 2008

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