Camaret
Thursdays Child
Robin & Joanna Minchin
Fri 8 May 2015 20:04
004.35.727W
Camaret
We began to see the looms of French lighthouses around midnight and then had some excitements approaching the first waypoint marking our landfall cardinal buoy; passenger ferries, cargo ships, oil tankers, and then 25+ sailing yachts all heading towards us on what looked like the start of a race as they were so close together..... any ideas? We asked the harbour master here but he didn't know anything about it. It looked like several were solo sailors and others had 'Vendee' in their boat names.
Oh, and then the GPS packed up. It wasn't a major panic as we still had the Open CPN and the Navionics but it was inconvenient to lose the waypoints so Hans undid various wires, tried making up a new antennae, couldn't find anything so thought perhaps the machine had got too warm. We left it an hour, plugged everything back in and it worked again! Phew.
What followed was a straight forward but exciting entry into the huge natural harbour, following marker buoys all the way, and incredibly the wind followed us around enabling us to sail to within a mile or so of Camaret harbour. We were tied up on a finger pontoon by 9am amid much merriment and relief on board as we are all quite tired from not much sleep on the rocking and rolling boat.
We have one night here and will catch the tide north after lunch tomorrow up through the Canal du Four, aiming for Cherbourg (another change of plan) so should be there by midnight Sunday.
Thank you to Carla for texting through the Election results at 6am!
It is definitely getting chillier....