What a welcome we had in Brittany! At the crew dinner on our first night in Paimpol at the Festival du Chant de Marin, Celia and I met Michel and Claire, who hadn’t been able to bring their boat because the engine had broken down. Over paella and bottles of festival red wine, raising their voices against a tide of sea shanties, rugby anthems and bagpipes, they urged us to sail along the coast after the festival to visit them in Trégastel, on Brittany’s ‘rose granite coast’.

English people sometimes make invitations like that just to be polite but this was France and we realised Michel and Claire meant it, so we made Trégastel our goal after the festival.

From Paimpol, we sailed 20 miles out of the Bay of St Malo and round the coast to the Tréguier river, where we found other friends: the crew of Le Grand Léjon, who had spent a day exploring an island in the estuary. Skipper Etienne came to meet us in their dinghy, invited us to dinner and waited without a word while we failed three times to anchor securely on the east side of the river. When we finally anchored successfully behind Le Grand Léjon on the west side, he ferried us on board for a sumptuous meal of freshly caught bass and mackerel baked with carrots, fennel, onion and white wine, washed down with wine, ginger liqueur and Odile’s mother’s home-distilled fire water. We ate, drank and sang. That’s Tina, Gilles, Etienne and Odile in the photo at the top of the page.

The next day, we beat 30 miles to windward to Trégastel past the nature reserve of Les Sept îles. I insisted on putting the mizzen up to go faster, as a result of which we missed the narrow, rocky entrance to Trégastel and careered a mile and a half further down the coast before I managed to bring all the sails down and Celia turned the boat round.

On the way there, I realised later, we had passed the tiny island of Yvinec, home of the young Bréton sailor Guirec Soudée who spent five years sailing 45,000 miles around the world alone except for a chicken called Monique. At the time, Yvinec was just another stack of rocks we needed to tack to avoid but I found out how close we’d come after I bought Guirec’s irresistible children’s book, The Hen Who Sailed Around the World.

I was anxious about arriving late because Michel had texted during the afternoon to say that he and Claire had invited friends for drinks at 7.00pm to meet us. When he collected us from our mooring in a RIB driven by a volunteer from the local Sauveteurs en Mer and we splashed onto the beach, we discovered that one of the friends was the correspondent of the local newspaper, Le Trégor, and I spent half an hour struggling to tell the story of Guiding Star in French.

Celia and I were overwhelmed by Michel and Claire’s hospitality. We found ourselves in a room full of people, drinking crisp white wine and eating fishy delicacies on crackers and Claire’s delicious savoury cake. Trégastel is a beach resort and there are plenty of holiday homes along the granite boulders of the shoreline; but these were people who had grown up here, perhaps moved away for work but had kept their connections and retired here. At the end of the evening, Gaël generously sculled us back to Guiding Star in the deepening twilight. It was a wonderful evening.

Top music at the Paimpol festival: for me, the Colombian band Puerto Candelaria playing joyous, passionate tunes at one in the morning on a stage on the big schooner De Gallant.

After Paimpol and Trégastel, we sheltered from a storm moving up the Channel by sailing six miles up the Tréguier river to Tréguier itself, a small mediaeval cathedral city with the finest shellfish restaurant I’ve ever eat in, Poissonerie Moulinet.

We stayed a day longer than planned because of an engine alarm, but that meant we heard a concert by baroque chamber group Le Banquet Céleste with the sublime counter-tenor voice of Damien Guillon. Here’s a recording of them performing the Bach Psalm 51 after Pergolesi which made the climax of the concert.

After that, the least said about the crossing back to Plymouth, the better. The wind blew fresh from the northwest where we wanted to head, Celia had a rare bout of seasickness, and somehow when we weren’t looking a wave or a gust ripped off and snapped the port whisker-stay bracket. We had to take down the jib, reef the bowsprit and motor the last 60 miles.

We started getting in tune early for June’s Festival of Salt Cod (La Morue en Fête) in Binic on the north coast of Brittany. The wonderful French lugger Le Grand Léjon joined the Brixham Heritage Regatta over the May bank holiday weekend and invited us on board to sing shanties and drink kir in the sunshine.

Le Grand Léjon is a replica of a nineteenth-century cargo lugger built to carry sand: below decks, she’s cavernous and although she’s only a couple of feet longer than Guiding Star, she displaces thirty tons. Etienne, in the green shirt below, is co-founder of a sea shanty group called Fortunes de Mer which has been working for fifteen years to collect and sing songs from ports all along the Channel coast. Many of the shanties are very funny, about clueless captains, drink-sozzled sailors and fishermen dreaming of hot, salty Paimpol beans (which do actually have an appellation d’origine protégée like Camembert and Stilton).

Rodolphe on accordion

Gilles on guitar

The racing in Brixham wasn’t our finest hour, since I mis-estimated how long it would take to reach the start line and arrived ten minutes late to see the two other boats in our class, Le Grand Léjon and I.R.I.S., already half-way across the bay. By the time we got back to the pontoon, the other crews were already breaking out the kir again.

Kate

Thomas

Rafted against Golden Vanity and Le Grand Léjon

Beating on port tack

Mid-tack

Brixham breakwater

We changed crews on Monday. Sadly, Thomas had to pull out of the trip to Binic because of an infection, and Kate and Celia had to go back to work. Andy and John joined the boat.

Le Grand Léjon led us across the Channel on Tuesday morning, reaching in a cracking westerly breeze on a big swell which turned all our stomachs. We slipped the town pontoon in Brixham at dawn and anchored in the River Trieux seventeen hours later, an average of nearly six knots. Early on, Le Grand Léjon left us behind, using what Etienne later called “un petit appui de moteur” (a little help from the engine) but by late afternoon we caught them up.

I felt confident entering an unfamiliar rocky anchorage at night across a fierce tide because we were following the immensely experienced Etienne in his home waters. But just when we were about to drop the anchors, all the electrics on Le Grand Léjon failed and they had to navigate the last few hundred yards by torchlight. We were saved by Navionics on my iPhone.

Brixham to Brittany in 17 hours

Le Grand Léjon leaving the River Trieux anchorage

Binic, like many harbours in Brittany, is a mile from the sea at low tide. The gate to the harbour needs eight metres of tide to open so we had only half an hour for a dozen boats to funnel through the entrance and berth. Once inside, though, we had the perfect layout for a traditional boat festival: a long pontoon the length of the quayside, so that visitors could look down on the boats.  

The outer harbour at high tide

Guiding Star on the pontoon

Storyboards for each boat

Crowds on the quay

Ship owner’s mansion

Newfoundland salt cod made fortunes

Binic church

The two shores of the Channel celebrate parallel but separate histories of the sea. On the English side, people remember the Armada, Cornish smugglers, Nelson and the netting of massive shoals of pilchards and herring. On the French side, the heroes are the privateers of Saint Malo Bay who seized Spanish galleons and, later, English merchant ships, and the men who for nearly five hundred years crossed the North Atlantic to fish for cod in the fog and sub-zero cold of the Newfoundland Grand Banks.

The French call it La Grande Peche, the Great Fishery. Binic and ports along the Channel and Atlantic coasts of France lived from Newfoundland cod until the 1970s, when governments reacted to disastrous declines in fish stocks by declaring exclusive economic zones around their coasts. Britain nearly went to war with Iceland over cod; Canada shut the French out and an industry died.

The Newfoundland fishery took men away for six months of the year in brutal conditions. They crossed the Atlantic on big three-masted ships but the fishing was done by line from small boats called dories, carried stacked on deck. Two or three men would scull into the freezing fog to set lines. At the end of the day, they hauled the fish in and had to find their way back to the ship; sometimes, they never arrived. On board, the catch was gutted and salted by men and boys working long shifts, soaked in icy water and up to their elbows in fish guts and blood.

Even in the age of steel ships and diesel motors in the 1960s, the fishery was exhausting, dangerous work. At the Binic festival, retired fishermen in their seventies and eighties gave talks and a demonstration of gutting and salting. One man told how he’d fallen overboard and spent three quarters of an hour in the bitter water but had been rescued by two Portuguese fishermen. He wept when he said he’d been taken to Portugal two years ago to meet one of them who was still alive.

The Association du Grand Léjon, the non-profit group of about 120 people who maintain and sail the boat, organised the maritime side of the festival and treated us to a magnificent buffet of beignets de morue, fritters of salt cod with young nettles accompanied by potato and rutabaga mash, caremelised carrots and salad, with yet more kir before the meal and white wine during it. We sat at long tables in a community hall with shanty groups singing on a stage and everyone joining in long lines of Breton dancing after we’d eaten.

Fortunes de Mer sang Breton songs and then invited all the English crews onto the stage to join in The Leaving of Liverpool. If you have good eyesight, we’re in the bottom left of the postcard they made of the event.

On the spur of the moment, I bought a kilo of salt cod from the gutting demonstration and carried it home across the Channel and on the train to London, mostly unrefrigerated, and found a recipe for beignets de morue. They had a great taste, the texture chewier and the flavour more intense than fresh fish. Try the recipe!

Glorious sun but no wind for the return passage

The French navy’s L’Etoile du Roy on its way to Normandy 75th anniversary

Nearly home

We didn’t plan to go to Guernsey. We wanted to visit the Isles of Scilly to explore wildlife and enjoy the Taste of Scilly food festival in what we hoped would be settled September sunshine.

Tropical Storm Helene put paid to that. By the day before we were due to set sail, the remains of this hurricane looked likely to miss Scilly but leave five metres of swell. So we decided to go in the other direction and hop among the Channel Islands.

A fresh southwesterly breeze gave us a fast crossing from Plymouth and at one point it looked as if we’d make St Peter Port in the early hours of the morning. However, the Coastguard warned that the Platte Fougere lighthouse marking the northern approach to St Peter Port wasn’t working reliably, and I thought we’d better turn south and come round the other side of the island.

The tide had other ideas. It swept us sideways so strongly that we couldn’t make any progress southwards at all. We spent two hours sailing back along exactly the track we had come. I calculated in the end that we might as well go back to the first plan and approach St Peter Port from the north. We’d used up so much time that we would now be arriving in daylight, so the unreliable lighthouse wouldn’t matter.

It took all morning even with the engine on to push against the tide that by then was sweeping up the Little Russell channel and reach St Peter Port. We berthed in an almost empty harbour: the sailing season seemed to have ended suddenly in the Channel Islands.

Maybe the weather forecast had something to do with it. We’d missed Tropical Storm Helene but two more named storms, Bronagh and Callum, were driving in from the Atlantic. Even sheltered in the crook of Brittany, we were in for strong winds. After a short discussion, we took the harbourmaster’s offer of four nights berthing for the price of three and decided to do any island-hopping on a ferry rather than sail ourselves. As it turned out, we had to wait two more nights for the aftermath of Storm Callum to die down and even then, had a rough and windy passage back to Plymouth.

There are worse places to be stuck than Guernsey, though. The island is beautiful and soaked in a unique history which most people in Britain hardly know. I’d never understood the odd legal status of the Channel Islands: they are the last remnant of William the Conqueror’s Duchy of Normandy, loyal to the Crown but never integrated into the United Kingdom and so never part of the European Union. In the 1970s, when the UK joined the EU and we started to eat Dutch tomatoes subsidised by the Common Agricultural Policy, the tomato industry which had been a mainstay of the Guernsey economy died in a decade. But Guernsey and Jersey were able to grow a financial services industry beyond the reach of UK and EU regulation.

Dark memories of the Second World War crop up all over Guernsey. The island is within sight of France and along with the other Channel Islands, was occupied by Nazi German troops within days of the fall of France in 1940. I was unsettled walking into the Tourist Information Office to see a large photograph of German soldiers in coal-scuttle helmets marching in front of Lloyds Bank.

Hitler saw great symbolic value in occupying what he saw, slightly inaccurately, as British territory. He imagined the British would do anything to get the islands back and poured in thousands of troops to defend them and thousands of workers, many of them slaves, to build concrete fortifications. The British government, though, was realistic. It saw no chance of recovering the islands without terrible loss of life and simply ignored them until after the Allies had retaken Normandy.

The German underground military hospital and ammunition store on Guernsey remains as concrete proof of Hitler’s futile obsession. Dug out of solid rock at the cost of many deaths among slave workers, the hospital and store were always damp, so ammunition had to be covered in tarpaulins. The 800-bed hospital was used for only a few weeks, when some of the German casualties from the Allied invasion of Normandy were brought here. When it became clear that the Allies were not going to attack the Channel Islands, the wounded men were brought back into the sunlight and treated in normal hospitals.

When the weather forecast kept us in Guernsey for an extra two days, I went in search of my own local history. My aunt Marie was very proud to come from Guernsey, although she was born in Essex just after the First World War and I’m not sure how much she ever lived on the island. I recently inherited a bible from her which belonged to her grandfather, and a happy morning in the Priaulx Library identified the farmhouse where he had lived in St Peters in the Wood. The oldest part of the building dates back to 1450 and the gable is pierced as a dovecote. The main farmhouse dates from the 1860s.

My aunt’s grandfather’s farmhouse

The 1450 part of the building is pierced as a dovecote

Beating into a northerly Force 6 gusting to Force 7 on the way back to Plymouth made for heavy work on the tiller. With two reefs in the main but both headsails up, Guiding Star didn’t balance. We do have a storm jib but I’ve never had it out of the bag and was hesitant to experiment now: a good lesson would have been to try it out on the pontoon on one of the days we were stuck in harbour.

We left by the northern entrance to the Little Russell and the last of the east-going tide pushed us dangerously close to the rocks north of the island of Herm. When the tide turned and we headed north, the leeway pushing us west was so great I thought we’d end up in Falmouth rather than Plymouth. The disturbed sea made us all feel sick and the cabin reeked of paraffin. It was only after we arrived in Plymouth that I realised the cabin lamp had been swinging and jerking so wildly that it had been oozing enough oil to make the cabin uninhabitable.

By next morning, though, we were sailing gently under a cloudless sky within sight of Start Point, spotting dolphins. Soon, we had to put the engine on to move at all across the glassy sea.

Still several miles from land, we saw what we thought was a small bird darting round the boat. It looked too small to be a seabird and had an odd, fluttering flight. We realised it was a bat, exhausted and looking for a perch. It tried to grab the leech of the mainsail and circled the mizzen where our red ensign had wrapped itself round the top of the mast in the wind. After several attempts, the bat clung onto the flag and crawled inside its folds. We knew how it felt.

The wind was too strong for island hopping but the sun shone brightly…

until the edge of Storm Callum arrived

Up to eight metres of tide in St Peter Port

German dive bombers attacked tomato lorries on the quay at St Peter Port

Four months into the Occupation, the paper had little it could say

Thomas and I took the ferry and walked round the island of Herm