Sailing to Brittany

26 July 2023 – Brest, France

We had a great passage from the Isles of Scilly to France; we had a run basically the whole trip even though the wind was quite light and we had to motor sail part of the way. We finally had the chance to put up the spinnaker, which worked great.

Sailing wing on wing to France – English Channel

Dolphins followed us for a lot of the way to play in our bow wave, which caused Sirius to run circles around the deck shrieking at them.

We arrived in Brest in the middle of the night and docked along the nearest pontoon. The next morning, we were informed that that wasn’t the berth reserved for us and we should relocate to a finger dock on the other side of the marina. It was pretty windy, but we figured it would still be fine. Once we got to the dock, there was another sailboat taking up half the space there and it looked like we wouldn’t fit, though the marina said that we would. The good news is that we did fit, the bad news is that there was about an inch of room between us and the other boat – we could only half fit on the length of the dock because we were wedged in so tightly that we couldn’t go further forwards.

After staying in Brest for a day and eating lots of pain au chocolat and baguettes, we sailed up a nearby river to meet up with some friends on their boat. It was great to see them and their dog Miss again. On the way there, we passed a ship graveyard where the navy apparently puts their vessels that are no longer in use. It was interesting but a bit eerie to see a bunch of abandoned big ships just moored on the side of the river.

There was a pretty village nearby consisting of about ten houses and a church which we walked around.

The next morning, we went to a nearby museum about the history of schools in the area. They had preserved the schoolhouse, as well as the rooms where the teachers once lived, so it felt like looking through a window into the past.

Grandparents Visiting

Last Stops in the UK

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