"We should be in Paris by now..."

WE SHOULD BE IN PARIS BY NOW

Many years ago, I signed on a small yacht for a trip to Brittany. This, I have to say, was before modern GPS technology, let alone, radar; depth finders; plotters; lap-tops; met-fax; SSB; EPIRB etc. We did have a state of the art Decca, wonderful in it’s day and the joy of the RAF but in the hands of initiates... More of that later. Still, we did have charts and compass, so we were bound to get there... Weren’t we?

The annual yacht club trip to Brittany had been planed well in advance. Ever since the Skipper had raised the suggestion of “Morlaix for breakfast”, we were packed and on board, at least mentally. We were the willing crew on the Little Breeze, and joined her on the pontoons off the club. Skipper, Tom; Navigator; Crew and me. We stowed the boat while keeping a weather ear on the radio forecast as It was still a little fresh along-side and the various yachts nosed and tugged at their mooring warps like ponies. Some of the bigger ones had gone the previous night to avoid a lumpy crossing but some would stay with the little fleet. The air of excitement was thick as treacle and sweet with the thought of a week or more in France.

We were clear of the moorings by late morning and made a polite call of intent to the coastguard. They in turn wished us well and though the sea piled astern, we felt safe in the sturdy little boat. Skipper had owned ‘Little Breeze’ for years. She was an easy sail and had been a weekend escape for as many summers as he could remember. Local stuff, but she had not crossed the channel and he was keen to go foreign The club cruise would be perfect.

We made a call to the commador’s yacht to check time and course, as we seemed to be sailing a little high, or they were freeing away south’erd for a better sail. Either way, a gap was slowly widening, though they were still well in sight and surging down the seas to Morlaix.

Our navigator, consummate and methodical tactician, suggested hourly fixes by Decca and Chart to cross refer. I was happy to see him bent over the saloon table as my own constitution was taking its time adjusting to the swell and Skipper cheerily let him get on.

‘And don’t go calling me “skipper”’, he laughed. ‘This boat’s a democracy’.

The navigator though, was not convinced the decca was accurate, as it seemed to be giving fixes that were, frankly, miles off. Soon he and Skipper were heads down, both below fiddling with the electronics and scratching their heads. In the cockpit and happiest steering and sailing, I was aware that the other yachts had disappeared and we were at one with the ocean. We all concluded that we would go by compass. The weather was easing, we were going well and we could almost smell the croissants and would catch the fleet later.

We slotted into our watch routine throughout the day and we kept ourselves warm and well fed, alternately chatting and silent in our own thoughts as is the pattern on passage. The shipping lanes, once so forbidding, were taken in our stride as evening progressed and Little Breeze seemed to bound along over a mercury like sea. Dusk descended slowly and the clear summer night wrapped its starry mantle over us. Sharing a watch with the other crew we perched in the cockpit in the small hours, silently in awe, as overhead the full moon, wearing Jupiter as an earing, cast a magical light over the seas.

Some hours later, anticipating landfall, I scoured the horizon for light. We calculated that we should be close but seemed to be taking a long time. Perhaps the log was misreading. Perhaps we weren’t quite as smart as we thought, but the simple sums of distance by speed put us well in sight of land, and land was not to be seen. Then, with a cheer, I spotted the loom of a light. Yes, yes there it was, clear as day. We pawed the chart. It must be Iles de Batz. We had made it, our first real channel crossing on our own. I slapped the navigator on the back.

‘Take us in Number One’, I saluted. ‘Now we know where we are’.

Less than convinced, he had fretted over sums all the way across and decided to stay awake till light to make absolutely sure. Relieved by Skipper, I turned in and crawled into one of the forepeak bunks to sleep the triumphant sleep of the just.

Watery sunlight streamed into the warm space as the crew shook me awake with a mug of tea.

‘Are we in?’ I smiled sleepily, imagining the quayside at Morlaix, with the elegant shops, the cafe’s, and the market crowding around the heels of the lofty viaduct.

‘No, not quite,’ she replied. ‘you might like to join us in the cockpit’

‘No?’ I fired, lunging out of the bunk. ‘We should be in bloody Paris by now.’

I scrambled out into the gray daylight. All sails were stowed and we were creeping ahead under power. A lowish coastline about two or three miles away met my bleary eyes and seemed to be almost encircling us. A bay? But which one? My companions addressed the charts.

‘It doesn’t make sense’, the navigator rubbed his face thoughtfully. ‘I suspected some error were likely, but where on earth are we now?’

‘Perhaps we could ask someone,’ I joked, ‘and if they reply in Dutch, we’re well lost’.

I went to reach for the pilot when the crew pointed and said,

‘See those fishing boats, they’re from Paimpol. I can see their registration, and they’re only crabbers, so they can’t be far from home”.

Her sharp young eyes had given us our first clue. Sure enough, not too far away were some local fishing boats busy pot-hauling.We scanned the horizon. It seemed to me, that out to starboard, a dent in the cliffs on the end of the bay was becoming into a distinct gap in the landscape.

‘There are some big islands out to the west’. I observed. ‘Where’s that chart?’

Skipper carefully started taking bearings with the hand-held.The only sizable islands on offer were Les Sept Iles off Perros Guirec, but we knew them, and these really weren’t that big. Our fingers coursed eastwards. Brehat? Surely not. They were miles away and way off our course. Even we couldn’t be forty miles out. The sums added up though. Time and distance put us deep in the bay of Paimpol, EAST of Isle de Brehat and in an area of known “magnetique anomalies”. We started searching for the charted towers that peppered the coast and before long, established once and for all that we were indeed to the east of Isle de Brehat and a very long way from our planned landfall in Morlaix. Though there is a channel inside Brehat, we decided to go outside to avoid the islands and their attendant rocks just to play safe. We knew the welcoming River Trieux would be around the corner where we would put in for a deserved rest and take stock. The sky was clearing now and the sun shone on sandy beaches and stone cottages. This was more like the Brittany we came for and thought perhaps life wasn’t so bad after all.

Once ashore we quickly established contact with the rest of the yacht club fleet and safely secured to the outer pontoons off the quay, we turned to the tricky business of establishing how four perfectly good sailors could be so far off course. We were all qualified enough, at least on paper, and though perhaps a little short on cross channel experience, we had all many years of salt in our veins and much good ol’ southwest weed below our collective waterlines. And therein could be found the seeds of our downfall.

So much, too much navigation was always done by eye over well trodden and familiar ground, with little recourse to actual sums. We rarely even looked at the compass. It was always there and certainly seemed to be doing its job, but over the years, it had slipped further and further behind and no-one noticed. I actually picked up a new hand bearing compass while we were in France and was horrified to find that either it, or the steering compass, was almost 45 degrees out and further experiments confirmed our suspicions. The poor old Decca had in fact been trying to tell us the truth, but like the bearer of bad tidings, we chose to ignore the message and trust to instinct alone. Dangerous. My sighting of the light on Ile de Batz was also grossly inaccurate. In my zeal to raise a light, I happily identified the wrong one (by forty miles). Thankfully, The navigator did not erupt with my enthusiasm and elected to stay on watch till he could identify the characteristics. Needless to say we were without GPS and radar then, though these oversights have also been addressed.

As it worked out, we never did join the fleet. We enjoyed a couple of nice days in Lezardrieux but the weather quickly turned foul. Rain on a hardened northerly set in for what seemed a dripping eternity, and we headed upriver to Pontrieux, where we decided to leave the Breeze in the capable hands of the harbour master while we legged it home, along with almost every other saturated holiday maker in France. We all had day jobs waiting in Blighty and had to get back. However, it meant we had a good excuse to retrieve the boat a few weeks later when the weather brightened up. As it surely did.

The homeward passage was a peach, and armed with a little up-to-date technology and a new compass, our pinpoint navigation only left us only with the choice of which side to take the buoy.