3 Big adults and 2 little kids on 1 small boat!
The lure of a salty seadog adventure, piloting a boat down from La Rochelle on France’s Atlantic coast to northern Spain was too much to resist. What’s life without an adventure? An endless cycle of bland work and monotony. I hadn’t sailed in years, so I felt a little nervous. But if I feel nervous it must be worth doing. That’s the way I think of it anyway…
So, after a flight to Bordeaux and a frenzied scuttle to catch the train to La Rochelle I emerged at the historic French port and met Malcolm, the captain of the boat in question…an 11-meter sailing boat, the Raingoose. He needed someone to help him pilot the boat south to the Spanish Border…a long stretch of coast with few available ports – and I got an adventure in return. That was the deal.
Stepping onto the boat I met my companions. Malcolm’s partner Sonsoles, and their children, five year-old Hugo and Olivia – how old was she? Two, Three at most? The kids’ manic energy and almost complete uncontrollability and epic tantrums I would have to survive for the foreseeable future. This boat and its tiny space would make up my world for the next week…
We set off at sunrise the next morning, so I never really got an opportunity to check out the town’s historic towers and bastions – a centre of Huguenot power, now transformed in a lively tourist resort surrounded by buzzy bars and cafés. We sailed slowly past the port’s towers in the gentle dawn light and out into the Bay of Biscay.
I was still tired from the day before, but I found I could still do a good job at steering – so I could make myself useful at least….I found this fun and throughout the journey often took the opportunity to switch off the autopilot system on the boat and take manual control. That first day I got used to sailing the boat, winching the ropes and to the general chaos of having two tiny kids aboard…and their parents constant battle to keep them from fighting one another or falling overboard.
That afternoon we headed into the expansive Girondine estuary and anchored in the shallow waters near a Club Med resort, to rest before the long haul down to the Pyrenees began. The beaches were fine golden sand, backed by pine forest…pretty, and in some ways similar to Donana National Park in Spain…but in general I found the ‘flatness’ of the scenery uninspiring.
Early next morning we started the long haul….sailing slowly southwards a few miles off a coast that never seemed to alter….an endless beach backed to pines. A couple of groups of dolphins swept by to check us out…but otherwise the day was fairly uneventful. We’d be sailing the night, so Malcolm and I divided the night into watches. I took midnight to 03:00 and 6:00 to 9:00 to 12:00 shifts.
Sailing at night is special…You sit alone on deck in perfect silence apart from hypnotizing slosh of the water and wind pushing at the sails….The night sky at sea is how it should be, but something few ‘urban’ people get to experience. It’s how the first humans experienced the night, with the bright strip of our Galaxy painted boldly across the sky, the constellations visible for all to see, and the bright light of Jupiter looking down from above. I found my eyes drawn to this image, wanting to save it in my memory before I returned to the land of light pollution. It was cold – I laid a blanket over my knees, even though it was summer, a watched shooting stars as they cut across our atmosphere.
On my second shift, again I sat alone and watched the sun colour the sky and the water and burst over low-lying French coastline. Tired, I took a Siesta in the afternoon and when I woke, after a day in a half of sailing, I was greeted by an entirely different spectacle – the soaring shapes of the Atlantic Pyrenees dominating the coast and land beyond. We were almost in Spain! We anchored in pretty French Basque port of Saint Jean de Luz…a town framed and enhanced by the mountains behind. A dive off the boat was magnificently refreshing – my first wash since La Rochelle…and as the sun sank behind the pier and divided into fiery bands, I felt renewed. Watching the kids, Hugo and Olivia, literally having a ‘whale of a time’ jumping off the boat and splash around with their mum and dad was also one of those few moments where I found them quite cute…not just characters to be quietly endured! A good day to be alive!
Part 2 coming soon!