47:42.68N 3:21.25Piriac – Pornic – Cruesty – Vannes – Cruesty – Port Louis W 

27^th August, 2022 

We’ve just been pottering more or less uneventfully, around old haunts. 

We met some nice folks with an Island Packet SP Cruiser which followed on from our 380 before IP went bust; they, like us, were very happy with it. Piriac to Pornic was moderately unpleasant with lots of rain but little wind. Tried a new restaurant in Pornic but it rained so much I had to ask for a bucket to catch the leak. Clare didn’t like Cruesty much last time but was happier; it really is a vast marina and needs a water taxi to get from one side to the other.
Made a silly mistake on the way into Vannes. It’s always a bit fiddly to find the way but we’ve done it many times before. There’s an important marker of a red house at one point which I found but then inexplicably forgot about and went the wrong way. We bounced around for a bit on a rising tide and eventually got free; I will however have to get a lift-out to check for damage when we’re back in Port La Forêt. 

Vannes is one of our favourite places around here (second only to La Rochelle) with good markets, restaurants, clothes and tat shops; we berth in the centre of town. We’d been going to stay 4 nights but were woken up at 04:00 by building works on the opposite bank of the river; these continued all day with two radio men loudly wittering on for hours about something or other. They then tested their sound system with a rapper so loud he shook the glasses on the boat at 50 paces distance. It turned out to be a local Chamber of Commerce exposition celebrating diversity and the music was clearly going to go on all night so we, like many others, fled back to Cruesty where even they had loud music, but only briefly. 

Back in good old Port Louis for a couple of nights. Oddly enough the big restaurant on the quayside (“fish&chips”,”100 ways of serving moules”) was shut on a Thursday in August. We ended up in another place with tables and stools like those at school, very basic but quite good cooking all accompanied by a few locals banging away with Spanish music. It begins to look like henceforth “we shall music wherever we go”! 

K