Dolphins Under My Bed

by Sandra Clayton

  We plan to leave tomorrow around noon on a falling tide, after first getting diesel from the fuel dock a short distance from our finger pontoon. Nothing is left to chance. We even go and have a look at the fuel dock. It is very narrow for a catamaran, but we pace it out to ensure we can get Voyager in. The approach to it is also rather awkward, with a semi-submerged ramp and a wooden stake warning of shallows, but they will not be a problem at slack tide.

  One of our two bottles of propane gas, which we use for cooking, refrigeration and hot water, runs out so we decide to amble over to the service station across the road to see if we can get it refilled. There is not only a fast current on Tréguier’s river, but also an 8.5-metre drop in the water level at low tide. Already the ramp leading from our pontoon up onto the quay is getting quite steep.

  The service station does not fill gas bottles on the premises. It sends them away to a refilling facility which takes a day or two, so we wander back to the marina and fall into conversation with the English-speaking marina attendant.

  Intuition is a strange thing. For a long time I tried to suppress mine, but finally succumbed to it, even if it does sometimes mean appearing a little odd. As we part and go our separate ways, and almost in spite of myself, I stop and call after the attendant, ‘We’re going to buy fuel tomorrow.’

  David looks at me sideways with the sort of expression which says, ‘Why did you do that?’ But the attendant doesn’t think me odd at all. Walking back to us he purses his lips and shakes his head. The fuel dock, he says, is not run by the marina, but by the service station across the road. When you want fuel, you have to go there and ask for someone to come here and serve you. No-one will be working at the service station tomorrow because it is a public holiday, and the following day is Sunday, so it won’t open again until Monday. He looks at his watch. They will be closing soon.

  We are mortified. If we have to waste two days of this precious weather window waiting for fuel we could end up in the middle of Biscay when the weather breaks. Although we had survived gale-force winds and 20-foot waves there once before, bringing Voyager home to the UK, it had been with an experienced sailor. We would prefer not to do it again now if we can avoid it.

  We run back up an even steeper ramp, and back across the road to the garage. Since it is late Friday afternoon, as well as the eve of a public holiday, there are a lot of cars on the forecourt. They will have to serve these first, they say, and then they will come. We rush back to the boat. After all that careful planning and self-congratulation we are going to be shunting out of our finger pontoon, into and out of a narrow fuel dock, and back into our vicious little finger pontoon again in a 4-knot tide. I want to weep, but there isn’t time.

  We manage it, despite Voyager’s notoriously slow-filling fuel tank. I muck up the ropes again, but a Frenchman who has tied up next door in the meantime joins me and we get Voyager in before the infamous current reaches its full force. The man is dark-haired and plump with a kind, sad face. His wife, who stays aboard their boat, is unsmiling, detached, elsewhere. They have a little dog with them, a concoction of English breeds in surprising combinations but the overall result is a cheerful curly brownness.

  We put on double springs again and indeed use virtually every rope we possess, on the better-safe-than-sorry principle; the way you get when you are rushed and stressed and all rationality has gone. When we have finished, our boat resembles one of those book illustrations of Gulliver after the Lilliputians have captured him and tied him down.

  Our berth has cost £21 for the night and the fuel £54, which hasn’t left much of our £100-worth of francs, so we set off to have a look round the town and replenish our funds at the same time. It is a pretty town centre up a steep hill with a lot of traffic and pavements only one person wide.

  Unfortunately all the cash points refuse to provide any money. We cannot find out why, because all of them have instructions in French only. However, we discover the town’s launderette, the restaurant where we will have dinner, and the medieval cathedral of St Tugdual with its spire of delicate stone tracery that lets the sky shine through.

  ‘Five minutes,’ says the woman in the cathedral doorway apologetically. A service has just finished and the clergy can be glimpsed disrobing in the panelled vestry. ‘We close in five minutes. So sorry.’

  We use the five minutes to take in the beautiful interior, a heart-rending Christ on a crucifix, and two wonderful carved wooden figures: St Peter with the keys of the kingdom and St Paul with his epistles.

  Tréguier lies in an area called Trégor, one of the four ancient regions of Basse-Bretagne where Breton is still spoken and traditions and local costumes are preserved. The town itself was founded in the 6th century by St Tugdual and was once a place of learning and a centre for the arts. The cathedral’s doors open onto a square. Around it are medieval shops and houses. They are mostly of stone with steep slate roofs. Some have towers, and a few have a black-and-white lath-and-plaster upper storey overhanging the street. An annual event here is a May procession called the Pardon of St Yves, the patron saint of lawyers. I never knew they had one.

  We’ve been back on board Voyager only minutes when a large motor yacht collides with the pontoon on our starboard side. The force of the tide is turning the vessel sideways. We go to assist, and fend off while its French skipper hops off and ties up with four short lines little thicker than parcel string, and no springs.

  We feel we have to warn him of the dangers of the tide here and tentatively explain the problem to him in a combination of halting French and mime. He thanks us most politely in impeccable English but says he thinks he’ll be OK as he’s kept his boat there for the past seven years. David and I sidle away from him, arranging ourselves so as to obscure his view of the cat’s cradle pinning Gulliver to the cleats behind us.

  ‘Shall I take some of them off?’ I whisper, as the man sprints up to his sun terrace for cocktails with his elegantly-dressed wife.

  ‘Nah,’ says David, beginning to droop with tiredness. ‘Leave ‘em.’

  Word obviously gets round, though, because during the course of the late afternoon people going ashore from other pontoons make a detour via ours to look at our mooring ropes. And a very old couple – she in traditional black with a headscarf, he leaning heavily on a stick – come from the town and spend quite some time contemplating them, as if they are a harbinger of approaching catastrophe, like a strange light in the sky or the village well overflowing.

  We dine this evening at a whitewashed, green-framed, lace-curtained little place near the quay. We eat seafood off wooden trenchers not unlike those behind the counter of the teashop in Castle Cornet circa 1510. The bill comes in a little square straw basket with a lid on. We have eaten royally and relaxed, thanks to a litre of smooth red wine, for £8.50 a head in the restaurant’s former cellar, now the Smoking Salon.

  When you have been stressed, and then you become relaxed with food and wine, there is a tendency to gaze around you as if you are in a gallery looking at paintings: still life, portraits, scenes of everyday life. Everything becomes vibrant, there is no self-consciousness. You don’t so much observe as absorb, and you are not so much a spectator as a medium for recording these things. And you capture on the canvas of your mind this restaurant and these people, for no other reason than that they, and you, are there, and they last for as long as memory lasts.

  In the far corner a small man wearing a skullcap, bookish, with a young woman of an age to be his daughter. To the left of our table, a swarthy man with a woman; both thin, cynical, sardonic. In front, a family: he round, in a spotless, high-necked, buttoned white top, the baker in medieval portraits; two women with him, one with the serene smile of a madonna and a small male child. Behind, two couples and a sun-bleached youth. The blonde woman wears shorts, her right leg jerking up and down as she relentlessly strokes her thigh with chewed fingernails. The man beside her (not her partner) talks endlessly, his dark-haired wife nodding approval. The youth, li
ke a beached windsurfer, wants to be anywhere but here with them. Oddly, no likeness of the blonde’s partner is captured, only her restless attention to the other man.

  Contrary to belief, part of the pleasure of foreign travel is not being able to speak the language: of being excluded from the rush and stress, the petty snobberies of class and the country’s economic, political and cultural dilemmas; while at the same time getting a break from your own. People, we will also discover, are particularly kind to those without their language, as long as their assistance is asked for with care.

  Back on board, I sit in the dark cockpit, in my favourite spot beside the companionway doors, with my back against the saloon bulkhead and my knees up under my chin. On the boat to my right, the man with the dour wife and the cheerful little brown dog smokes a last cigarette and sings very softly to himself in the darkness before going to bed.

  To my left, the shapes of the medieval town are outlined by street lamps. The cathedral spire with the delicate stone tracery lets the lamp light shine through and seems to tilt a little to one side. A house near the quay is squat and square. It has a round tower on its corner with one of those typically French conical roofs whose curve defies the very nature of flat, brittle slate.

  The lamps along the quay are yellow; up on the hill a church is lit from below with white spotlights. Between them they send slender shafts of gold and silver shimmering across the surface of the dark water towards our boat.

  On the bank an unseen woman recites a poem in a high, clear voice. The words are lost to me, but their rhythm turns them into music, rising and falling like notes from a flute. And then there is silence. The river is still. It has been a good day.

  12

  Tréguier to L’Abervrac’h

  Next morning we wash Voyager down, fill our water tanks and go into town. It is our first experience of a French launderette, or indeed of any launderette since the early days of our marriage. There is no indication as to what value coins should be used in the washers or driers. There is, however, a French woman, folding linen on a large table, helped by a small girl.

  ‘Pardonnez moi, Madame.’ I have my French currency spread on my palm as I approach. I don’t want her to think I’m asking her for money, or for change.

  ‘Ah!’ She smiles and pounces on a coin. This one: she holds it aloft and points to the washer. These two: the drier. And this: she points to a little machine on the wall in the corner I hadn’t noticed which dispenses soap powder, something I’d forgotten to bring. Not satisfied that she has done enough for me, she begins to explain in French how to use the machines.

  I put coins into the wall machine for 4 francs-worth of little individual packets of surprisingly pungent soap powder. For weeks afterwards its distinctive smell will waft out of any locker where anything that has been washed in it is stored.

  While I get the washers going, David sets off on another attempt to get some French currency. He returns triumphant brandishing cash. He has finally worked out that unlike English ATMs at the time, but typical of every European one we would subsequently encounter, after you put in your pin number you have to press the button confirmer – confirm.

  It has become hot and airless in the launderette so David takes a chair onto the pavement outside where it is pleasantly cool. He settles himself there with a magazine, ready to load the driers at the appropriate time. Clutching French currency I set off up the steep hill to the shops. I buy bread and some gorgeous caramel custard pastries, big juicy pears, brie, tomatoes and ten views of medieval Tréguier to post home. In between times I can’t help noticing a decidedly stop/start quality to the town’s traffic. For no apparent reason, at one moment it is clogging up the streets and the next it evaporates.

  As I walk back down the hill I see a car stop outside the launderette and its driver accost David. Other cars pull up behind it. David lifts his shoulders, raises his palms and shakes his head. The traffic then moves on. Moments later another car stops, other cars pull up behind it, David gives the same shrug and the cars move on. It happens several times more before I reach him.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I ask.

  Tourists, he says, seeing him in his chair on the pavement, take him for a local and keep stopping to ask directions. None of them speaks English and his first few attempts to explain that this was his first visit here only resulted in grid-locking half the town. So he has resorted to a Gallic shrug and Tréguier’s traffic keeps flowing.

  We leave the marina at noon, just as the tide begins to ebb. We intend to travel through the night, arriving at L’Abervrac’h around dawn the following morning. The estuary of the River L’Abervrac’h is a good place to rest and wait for the right tidal conditions for the passage through the Chenal du Four. We have a mountain of rope to remove. When we have done so, the Frenchmen from the boats either side of us materialize to fend us off the pontoons if necessary and wish us bon voyage.

  The falling tide carries us down the river and back out to sea. Once clear of the rocky entrance we let out the sails but, because the wind is very light and almost on the nose, we motor-sail. We make good speed throughout the afternoon, around 7 knots with the current behind us, but keeping well out to sea to avoid outlying rocks. It is a very pleasant sail in bright sunshine.

  Early evening, after passing the group of islands and reefs called Les Triagoz, we alter course which brings the light wind into a more favourable position. To maintain our present speed, however, will get us to L’Abervrac’h, and another rock-strewn river entrance, while it is still dark. So we cut the engine and purely sail for the first time this year, ghosting through the night in a gentle breeze with the shadowy mainland in the distance.

  So light is the wind, and with the tide slowly turning against us, that progress drops at times to barely a knot. But sitting in the cockpit there is no urgency. The sky is clear, with a bright quarter moon and Venus beside it, like the star and crescent. The night is calm and cool. The only movement apart from us is from two shooting stars and the lights of a few distant boats.

  Five miles off L’Abervrac’h the wind becomes too light and variable for the sails so we take them in and turn on the engine. As we near the rocky reef at the entrance to the river, the GPS screen displays the message No Position Found. It is hard to describe the effect of arriving at a difficult river entrance in the dark without an accurate course to follow. Panic is the word which springs most immediately to mind.

  When this initial moment has passed, David remembers that months earlier he had bought a hand-held GPS as part of his planning for emergency situations and equipment failure. He fetches it, gets it out of its box, turns it on, and while it searches for satellite signals to lock onto and find our present position, he feeds in the co-ordinates for the waypoint to which we are heading. Just as the hand-held GPS begins showing a course, the other one comes back on again. It is to become a regular feature of our main GPS that when approaching a dangerous entrance to a harbour it will stop functioning and display the message No Position Found.

  We arrive at L’Abervrac’h at 7.15. It is a cold, damp morning. We tie up to a buoy and are in bed within half an hour. The alarm clock is set for a little before noon. We are both tired after a night passage, but fail to sleep nevertheless and are pottering around by eleven. We break our fast with tea, French bread and blackcurrant jam and listen to the 12.02 shipping forecast – Variable mainly NW backing SW with gentle-to-moderate winds. As we slip our mooring and head for the Chenal du Four it is almost calm.

  13

  The Chenal du Four to Douarnenez

  The Chenal du Four is a stretch of water between the French mainland and a group of islands, the largest of which is Ushant. There is a romance attached to some place names, and an evocative one for British sailors is Ushant. In the days of clipper ships, and limited navigational aids, ships’ captains used it as a waypoint. When they saw it they knew exactly where they were, and could then set a course for the southern English ports of Plymouth, So
uthampton or Portsmouth.

  The Cruising Association Handbook, 8th edition, warns: It is important to note that with strong winds against tide, severe steep seas build up in the Chenal du Four which may be beyond the capabilities of the average small yacht. It has a wicked current and is littered with shoals, rocks and marker buoys and care is needed to take it at the right state of the tide; hence our short stop at L’Abervrac’h. Take it against the tide and you make very slow progress. Take it on the flood and there’s a chance you will not have enough control to avoid its rocks and shoals.

  There is a famous lighthouse here. Anyone who has browsed in a poster shop will probably have seen an arresting picture of gigantic waves crashing against a lighthouse with such force that they reach its light. That is the Chenal du Four lighthouse, with the channel’s violence at its height. Today, despite the forecast, there is so little wind we have to motor all the way. And it gets so hot that I have to go below for a shirt to keep off the sun. It is redolent with the smell of French washing powder.

  By the time we’ve got through the Chenal du Four, the tide is about to run against us and our timing will be wrong for going through the Raz de Sein. David consults the cruising guide and, seeing no suitable anchorages, decides to head for a marina at a place called Morgat.

  Mid-afternoon we pass the entrance to the Rade de Brest, an enormous bay containing the city of Brest and France’s premier naval base. Two French Navy boats, leaving a massive wake, roar into the bay, scattering two old wooden-masted, gaff-rigged boats as they go. One has buff-coloured sails and a buff hull. Against a dark cliff-face it looks two-dimensional, like a picture in a children’s book. The other, with traditional red-brown sails, has an extraordinary prow. When they have finished bouncing in the Navy’s wash they continue on their stately way into the Bay of Brest.