There’s nothing like the peace of anchoring for the night in a quiet bay far from the busyness of a marina or a harbour and watching the sun go down. July in Brittany in a heatwave was the ideal time to explore some new places and leave the restaurant food and the hot showers till another day.

But first, dolphins. A large pod found us while we were still motoring south from Falmouth waiting for enough breeze to put the sails up.

The photo at the top of the page shows our first stop after crossing the Channel from Falmouth. We’d intended to anchor in a bay on the north side of the outer approach to Brest, the Avant Goulet (‘outer throat’). But when we shot out of the bottom of the Chenal du Four, we hit a fresh breeze from the east and changed plan to beat for shelter under the cliffs by Camaret sur Mer. The Anse de Bertheaume on the chart below was our original destination.

Lois left a fishing line down overnight but caught mostly starfish. A small fish died on her hook and the starfish spent the night scrambling over its caracass.

Then to Brest to have our passports stamped. Not on a Sunday, of course, but we went ashore anyway and demolished several crabs at the Crab and Hammer. It does what it says on the sign.

It’s not much more than 30 miles from Brest to Douarnenez but we were early for the Temps Fete festival so spent a night on the north side of Douarnenez Bay in the beautiful Anse Saint Nicolas.

In Douarnenez (pop. 14,000) for the first time in four years, I found unexpected tensions. A town council for many years run by leftists has been won by right-wingers. Fly posters complain that Douarnenezians are becoming an endangered species because of holiday rentals and the ‘Sardine Walk’ trail of story-boards appears to have been crudely edited. The last story board used to tell how Douarnenez was the ‘Red Town’, one of the first places to elect a Communist council in 1921 and celebrating a history of labour activism in the sardine factories. Now there’s just a patch of fresh asphalt where the story board used to stand. Luckily, someone has posted all the storyboards to Pinterest so here’s No. 17 in three languages.

Heading north again, we finally made it to the Anse de Berthaume. It’s pretty, but protected only from the north and full of mooring buoys.

We chose Roscoff on the north coast as the most convenient port to have our passports stamped out, but the town turned out to be a delight: fabulous stone-carved mediaeval merchants’ houses, an ‘Exotic Garden’ of semi-tropical plants, top-quality crepes and a free bus that linked marina, town and supermarket. The modern marina was efficient and we had only a five-minute walk to the ferry terminal to have our passports stamped.

Manoeuvering a 16-tonne traditional boat with offset propeller out of the marina took a multi-point turn and a mile out into the Channel, we realised that all the forwards and backwards action had broken the engine throttle cable off the engine control. It was fortunate this hadn’t happened when we were nudging between expensive boats. We could still operate the engine with Peter’s foot doing the job of the cable, though, so we pressed on across the channel.

Arriving in Plymouth, we anchored in Cawsand Bay and shipwright Graham, who lives in Cawsand, rowed aboard to join in studying the problem. He suggested a long piece of string to pull the throttle lever until we could replace the cable, and with that high-tech solution we berthed smoothly at home in Plymouth Yacht Haven.

After three years of pandemic lockdowns and uncertainty over post-Brexit passport arrangements, we finally made it to France! We sailed Guiding Star to northern Brittany, to Binic’s friendly annual festival of boats, food and music celebrating the generations of French fishermen who spent six months a year catching cod in the freezing fog off Newfoundland.

We set sail from Plymouth after breakfast, reached straight across the Channel in a steady breeze and warm sunshine, and anchored off Binic at dawn next day to wait for the nine-metre high tide we needed to cross the sandy beach and enter the harbour.

Brexit has added some friction for British sailors: we used to just sail to and fro across the Channel and nobody bothered with passports or boat documents. This time, once we locked in on the afternoon high tide, we had an hour to hunt down the customs police headquarters before they closed. We borrowed a kind friend’s car, Google-mapped our way to a small industrial estate several miles away (thanks to Chris for continual reminders to drive on the right), and made it in time. An overworked customs officer stamped our passports, for me the first French stamp since I went on a school French exchange in 1971.

We should properly have sailed to St Brieuc, six miles down the coast, because non-EU boats should only make land in northern Brittany in one of three ‘ports of entry’ widely spaced along the coast. But the festival organisers persuaded the police to let us sail direct to Binic.

To stamp out of France after the weekend of fun, we should have gone back to the customs headquarters on Monday during office hours, so missing the dawn high tide to set sail. But in an ‘exceptional procedure’, two officers in plain clothes met us in a car park in Binic on Sunday afternoon and stamped our passports in the back of a white van. I hope in another couple of years, someone will have negotiated a pragmatic deal to allow sailors cross the Channel as easily as we used to and let the customs police to get on with catching smugglers.

Our passage back took nearly twice as long as the trip over, first motoring for 12 hours through a millpond sea, then beating into a fickle northwesterly blowing from exactly where we wanted to go. But we did hoist Guiding Star’s new topsail for the first time, and it set perfectly. We had last season’s new sail, the big genoa, up as well as 2020’s new main and staysail, so this was the first time we’d had all Guiding Star’s four new sails up at the same time.

I then left the sails up for too long when the wind freshened and let the genoa drag over the side when I thought it was safely tied up on deck, but we recovered well. We berthed in Plymouth after 36 hours at sea and just made it to the pub before the kitchen closed. Many thanks to Chris, John and Martin for a terrific trip.

I wanted to go to France for the first time since the pandemic, but after several days of email exchanges to pin down the new post-Brexit arrangements for clearing customs and immigration in Brittany, I gave up. But that brought a chance to sail to one of the most beautiful places on earth, the Helford River.

On the passage down, we dodged low cloud and fog. But then the sun came out; and later, an extraordinary orange moon rose in a cloudless night sky.

Moored in Fowey on the way back to Plymouth, we climbed Polruan Hill and watched the tide flood up the river, each boat swinging as the line of darker blue reached her.

By our home marina in Cattewater, the skilled team on the Island Trust’s schooner Johanna Lucretia manoeuvred her against the wharf in Turnchapel to work on her hull at low tide as we were walking to the pub for a celebratory meal.