30s chic in La Turballe
A year afloat: to the Caribbean and back
Sam and Alex Fortescue
Tue 7 Sep 2010 16:53
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47:20.75N
002:30.72W
La Turballe? I hadn't heard of it a couple of days
ago. But you'll be interested to know it is the premier mackerel port on
France's Atlantic coast. Indeed. It also specialises in rain - some of it heavy
- and banks that won't break €50 notes.
As if to confirm the port's piscine pedigree,
we got into a huge shoal of mackers on our way in here on Sunday afternoon. The
fish count has rocketed exponentially (infintely so, in fact, from a
mathematical standpoint), from nought to 12. All in the space of an hour. Sunday
saw the wind drop away to 3 knots, so we thought we should get the lines out on
passage from Houat to La turballe. We've got a handline which has conspicuously
failed to deliver more than a gallic shrug from passing fish, but also a
seriously cool bit of kit called a Penn Senator. This is basically a huge reel
that you mount to the stern (back) of the boat and bait with whatever you like.
It accommodates a good mile of line, and allows you to adjust the sensitivity at
which line pays out.
Anyway, we had a silly orange sprat thing made of
plastic that dances along under water, trawled from the Penn. And suddenl it
began leaping out of the water in a way it isn't supposed to do. I hauled in a
couple of large mackerel (a good 15 inches long) this way, then stuck out the
handline as well. At one glorious point, the hooks of the handline had barely
gone over the side, before I saw a large silver shape dart in and side swipe one
of the lures. I had the feeling we could have caught many more fish if we'd
wanted. But, as Alex said as she prised the line away from my fingers, "do you
really want to be eating macker for breakfast, lunch and supper for the next
three days?".
Moored up in the marina here, we decided to see
what the town had to offer. It being a Monday, the answer was very little, but
there's a musee de la peche that I'm keen to visit whenever it finally deigns to
open. In the rain yesterday we made our way to Guerande - the mediaeval capital
of French salt production. Even shiny with the downpour, it was a desperately
sweet little walled city. In true tourist style, we got stuck into a creperie
for a couple of hours, before racing round a bizarre little museum in the city
walls, apparently dedicated to whatever the curator had managed to get his hands
on. Much of it regvolved around traditional local dress on 100-year old
mannequins, which must have been pretty alarming even back in the early 1900s,
but now look like something from a hitchcock movie (see below).Supper was...
(can you guess) mackerel fillet, accompanied by the excellent 1958 film
Vikings!
Tuesday was more profitably spent cycling around
the saltpans of Guerande. They function according to an incredibly intricate
arrangement of ponds and ditches, designed to evaporate seawater at each stage
and concentrate the salt. In the last stage, crystals of salt form on the
surface of shallow pools called oeillets, and are collected by dudes with huge
scrapers on sticks. It is then sold to tourists like us for vast sums. Practiced
even now, as much for tourists as anything, this attractive form of salt
'farming' is what brought the region wealth and prominence for centuries. Take
notes. There will be a test.
Tomorrow, on to the Ile de Noirmoutier - officially
beyond the limits of Brittany.
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