The French life

Hello everyone! August is the month during which the French go on holidays, meaning that we are currently always surrounded by lots of other sail boats on the water and by lots of Parisian tourists on land. This has been very nice and lively though!

Being in France in August also means that our French friends and family can come and visit more easily and we’ve been very happy to spend some time with them! We met up with Louis’ parents for an afternoon, with Alex and Will who were also sailing around the Ile de Ré, and with Antoine and Marc, who came from Paris 🙂

Funnily, as we were having dinner on our boat in the harbour of the old town of la Rochelle, a familiar boat arrived: it was one of the boats that we knew from Spain and that had done the crossing of the Bay of Biscay with us but aiming at a different island. We got to catch up with the owners and share our respective stories of the crossing.

Sailing in France in August also means that it can get quite crowded in tiny harbours… We for example experienced this in the charming harbour of Saint Martin de Ré, where we had to dock onto other boat.. This means that only the first boats arriving at the harbour get a place along a pontoon while all following boats attach themselves on the first boats. You can imagine the mess when the first boat decides to leave at 7am while all others want to stay!

Overall, we spent a few days on the Ile de Ré and the Ile d’Yeu, where we tried out windsurfing, cycled around, enjoyed the nice vendéen architecture and the French food!

We are now in Noirmoutier, where Louis used to spend a lot of time every summer since his parents had a summer house there until not long ago. But as a good start, Louis just fell into the harbour water haha.

On Friday, we should get perfect winds to sail fastly to Concarneau, on the south-western part of the Bretagne, where we will meet up with Sara’s mum and sister. We’ll then continue sailing around the tip of the Bretagne and should reach Paimpol around the 12th of August and cross towards England shortly after. And of course, during all this journey around France and the UK, we’ll keep having plenty of visitors 🙂