PDR – Page 9 – tide by tide

Biscay cruise

This year, after a few days fitting out in Vannes, we had a brief local cruise and then left the boat in the inland city of Redon for 5 weeks, a very economical but pleasant place where we were charged only a couple of hundred euros.

Redon is 25 miles up the freshwater Vilaine, so after our return from home there was a pleasant dawdle back to the sea, with an overnight stop at a lonely pontoon out in the fields with no-one else in sight.

After passing through the lock into tidal waters, we headed round to Le Pouliguen, near La Baule, where we anchored for a rather disturbed night, because a swell got up in the early hours. Next morning early we set off for Sables d’Olonne in the Vendéé.

As we were passing the island of Noirmoutier, the battery alarm went off because the new alternator, which we had just installed ourselves at Redon, had blown. Thankfully there was an excellent engineer near the marina who worked out why two had blown in quick succession, put it right and fitted a new one.

Continue reading “Biscay cruise”

Vannes and the Aussi menace

Wintering in Vannes, we’ve been under massive attack from ficopomaticus enigmaticus, otherwise called the Australian tube worm.

Lovely place to winter afloat, Vannes, right by the old walled town and its markets and restaurants. The main gate through the mediaeval walls overlooks the basin.

Continue reading “Vannes and the Aussi menace”

What to do with an old liferaft

It’s 17 years old, requires expensive annual servicing and it’s cheaper to buy a new one: here’s a fun way to dispose of the old one, on a pond:

River Ore’s hidden pool

We’ve many times threaded through the shifting gravel banks to enter the River Ore in Suffolk without seeing what is sometimes hidden behind – a clean, warm, tide-free swimming pool, 10 feet deep in the middle and perfect for a dip on a hot afternoon in August. Local residents told us it appears every few years but is it’s an easily-guarded secret – you can’t even see it from the top of the beach by the coastguard cottages. Not sensible to try to get to it by boat, of course.

Taking your dinghy through the Venice canals

After last year’s exploration of the Venice lagoon (see this post), we learnt recently about pilotage inside Venice’s own canal system, with a tour in a private motor boat. With care, you could do the same in a visiting yacht’s tender.

Shout as you approach a junction.... — Shout as you approach a junction….

A new set of municipal rules took effect on 1 April, though apparently some of its key provisions, such as limits on the speed of water taxis, were dropped after protests from their vociferous spokesmen.

In a nutshell, drive on the right except for one canal near Piazzale Roma in the North West which for obscure reasons has a keep to the left rule. Continue reading “Taking your dinghy through the Venice canals”

Thames dangers

Last May I wrote that actors Timothy West and Prunella Scales were banned from taking their hired narrowboat onto the tidal Thames at Limehouse in 2014 for a TV programme, even though we had managed the same trip with the same company shortly before. I was surprised and puzzled.

I now have to admit that I didn’t do enough research on the problem, having just discovered from the website of Black Prince , the hire company, that they have withdrawn their London fleet. One of the reasons is a ban on using the tidal Thames.

A quick search located a lot of internet discussion of the repercussions of an accident in August 2014, when a hire boat found itself straddled across the bows of a moored houseboat in a strong tide and gusty winds just above Hammersmith Bridge. It was rescued by an RNLI lifeboat. The Port of London Authority’s reaction was to reclassify hired narrowboats as commercial, and effectively ban them from the tidal Thames. Continue reading “Thames dangers”

Summer cruise to the Morbihan

This summer we took the boat to southern Brittany for 6 weeks, a 950 mile round trip that convinced us that it is worth much more exploration. For nearly three weeks of the cruise we kept the boat in the Gulf of Morbihan, the little inland sea full of islands that runs up to the city of Vannes.

The average air temperatures in the region are significantly higher than in the English Channel in summer, the food is excellent and the beaches beautiful. Though the Biscay coast (the Golfe de Gascogne on French charts) is exposed to Atlantic swells from south to west, there are some lovely sheltered cruising areas, including Quiberon Bay, canvassed as a sailing site for a coming French Olympics bid, and the almost entirely enclosed Gulf of Morbihan.

For the rest of the post, follow this link.

Race fleets hogging marinas

Three times on our cruise to southern Brittany we were turfed out of marinas and harbours because of race fleets: at Torquay Marina, where we arrived just before dawn, we were ejected as soon as staff arrived because the marina was fully booked for a Figaro single-handed race; at Port Tudy, on the Ile de Groix, we were turned away for the another race fleet; and at L’Aber Wrac’h we were refused a second day when we wanted to stay, because a 120 strong race fleet was arriving that afternoon, which was going to more than fill the marina. Each of these fleets were closing a succession of ports, day by day over anything up to a week. With L’Aber Wrac’h in particular, there isn’t anywhere convenient near, and tired arrivals that day from Falmouth or Dartmouth must have been furious, since it is the standard stopover when heading to the Chenal du Four.

It would be great to find a way of broadcasting the information about closures more widely: maybe something for Reeds Almanac or the Cruising Association to pursue?

Useless marina internet

Marina internet is a waste of time. It’s fun doing a live blog of a cruise, but it was so difficult to get web access on our 900 mile round trip to the Morbihan this summer that I failed to file anything en route, and will do a single post later.

021 — How we got marina wi-fi in Vannes, but nowhere near the boat. (The jacket shelters the tablet from the rain).

Every single marina over 4 weeks advertised wi-fi, and only one actually delivered it in practice at a decent speed, with the rest either intermittent and unworkably slow, available only a few yards from the marina office, or simply not showing up on my tablet’s wi-fi source list. Some marinas openly confessed to technical problems, others were incredulous at our inability to log on. At most marinas, it was a cheek to advertise wi-fi at all. Maybe sailing magazines should be taking this on as a campaign.

There were cafes and restaurants, of course, but we went to drink and eat not write in a corner. I’ve also filed posts in the past from my phone using 3G, but we seem to have consistently chosen places where the 3G signal was poor, so that didn’t solve the problem either.

Pilotage in the Venice lagoon

Quite by accident while wandering around Venice with friends who live there, we crossed paths with a neighbour of theirs, who turned out to be one of only two women drivers of vaporetti on the lagoon.

When told we were on a hire boat she pretended to collapse in hysterical laughter, Continue reading “Pilotage in the Venice lagoon”

Round the Venice lagoon by barge

The beauty of Venice is so great that even the high-season overcrowding is still bearable. Now we’ve found a way of seeing the city in spring, summer and autumn without feeling oppressed by the sheer numbers around us. A week afloat on a barge is is the answer, because you see Venice in the context of its whole lagoon, and can slip easily away from the crowds.

Arriving, for example, at the island of Torcello in the evening, after the day-trip boats have left, is a blissfully peaceful experience. We found a mooring up a tree-lined creek on the far side of the island from the excursion landing stage, right behind the basilica. It was just an hour and a half slow cruising from Venice. In the city itself, we spent two nights in the peaceful surroundings of a yacht club marina at St Elena, in easy reach of the sights but away from the crowds.

Read the rest of the post by following this link: Round the Venice lagoon by barge.

The mooring on Torcello — The mooring at Torcello

Venice Biennale – all at sea

We had hardly started on the Venetian lagoon when we came across this site-specific installation by Gavin Turk, the much-praised Young British Artist (now of course no longer so young). Here is some of the publicity material we found flying about in the wind from the Biennale*. Continue reading “Venice Biennale – all at sea”

Round Venice

A year ago we went round London by barge, and next week we’ll go round Venice, with the same seven-strong crew. We will start from a barge base at Chioggia, and plan to visit Venice itself and several other islands, including Torcello, and maybe up the River Brenta towards Padua or the Sile towards Treviso. Not sure whether the mobile internet reception is good enough to allow a daily blog, but we’ll load a picture log during the week.

Chart errors (contd).

Several earlier posts covered inaccuracies in charts. Last week I came across yet another example in Cala de Portinax, a bay at the north end of Ibiza in the Balearics. This screen shot from my Navionics chart shows depths in a fair amount of detail: yet the numbers were wrong by a factor of three or four. Because of the modest depths shown, we motored in with great trepidation in Olivia Jane, a Beneteau 43 with a 2 metre draft. Yet we found the depths in the middle of the bay were all in the 11-13 metre range and even close in to the rocky shore we anchored in 8 metres. In contrast, the C-Map chart on the cockpit plotter gave no depths at all inside the bay, which is a safer option than mistaken information. We’ve fed this back to Navionics and await a reply, but the nagging question will always remain in future, even if this proves to be a rare mistake: can we trust the inshore information on these charts? What if the mistake had been the other way, showing 11 metres when only 2 metres was there? Do other brands of charts have similar errors? Continue reading “Chart errors (contd).”

PS on last year’s Round London

I have just watched a delightful programme in which actors Timothy West and Prunella Scales circumnavigated central London in a narrow boat from Black Prince, the same as the holiday we blogged on last year. It was, however, surprising when Timothy announced in Limehouse Basin that hired narrowboats are not allowed on the river: not so.

We went up the Thames from Limehouse at the same time as several other Black Prince boats last May. The only condition was that someone on board had to have a VHF/DSC licence and a handheld radio hired from the company, which was fine, as three of us had licences. At least one of the other boats, a group of Norwegian holidaymakers, hired a pilot, and I assume that was negotiated with the company.

So don’t be put off: the exciting river passage was perfectly possible unless they drastically changed the rules between May and the summer when the episode of Channel 4’s Great Canal Journeys seems to have been filmed.

Timothy and Prunella met Andrew Sachs – Manuel from Fawlty Towers to Prunella’s Sybil – on a Regents’ Canal stop, an excuse for old clips from the show. From Limehouse, they did the Thames section of the circumnavigation in a fast river launch.