Position: 48°35’57.0″N 4°44’06.9″W

Brittany’s coastline is as rugged and beautiful as it gets. New Englanders would recognize the jagged rocks and tenacious pines that fade in and out of the fog that forms when warm air meets cool Atlantic waters. Which is pretty much all the time in summer. Trees cling to the cliffsides and lean away from the dominant winds. They hint at what winters are like here. A haven for seabirds and shellfish, big tidal flows drive currents that bring life swirling in and out of the bays and coves all along the coast. Dolphins gambol in the currents; chasing fish sweeping in and out of the tidal surges that come every six hours.

This seemingly pristine corner of nature’s realm is in reality a poster child for why the world needs renewable energy. Over the past 60 years a series of supertanker groundings spilled millions of tonnes of oil onto the shores of northern Brittany. Thousands of birds were killed and countless sea life destroyed.

For the past 10 days we’ve been following the path of the Amoco Cadiz’s oil slick back to where the ship first ran into trouble. The good news is nature did what nature does best and cleaned everything up. The same can’t be said of the response to the first big supertanker oil spill in Britain, the Torrey Canyon.

Torrey A Door

Supertankers have a bad reputation. And justifiably so. Two major oil spills in the English Channel a decade apart shaped maritime history and reshaped environmental laws around the world. The first involved one of the world’s very first supertankers, the Torrey Canyon. On March 18, 1967, the captain of the Torrey Canyon decided to take a shortcut so his ship could reach port before low tide forced another day’s delay. Through a combination of miscommunication and navigational errors, the tanker ran aground on Seven Stones Reef, just off the notorious Isles of Scilly. 120,000 tonnes of crude oil poured into the English Channel. An oil slick the size of Memphis, Tennessee, formed and spread across the Channel killing birds and sea life up and down the Cornish coast, Brittany, and the Channel Islands.

Bee Pee

The primary goal of the clean-up was not to protect the environment. Rather it was to protect Cornwall’s economy, which was then, as now, heavily centred on the tourist trade. A spill of this magnitude was unprecedented, and the British Government reacted quickly. First it attempted to break up the slick by spraying emulsifiers on it. Ironically, the oil in the Torrey Canyon belonged to British Petroleum (BP). BP also supplied the detergents and emulsifiers to aid in the clean-up. The army swept in and poured thousands of gallons of detergent onto Cornwall’s beaches. They even dropped 50-gallon drums of the stuff off cliffs where access was difficult.

If you’re cynical about big corporations, then you won’t be surprised that beaches cleaned with BP’s detergents took more than 12 years to recover. The French took a low-tech approach to cleaning and skipped the detergents. Instead, townsfolk scraped up the oil by hand. Their hard work, skepticism, and diligence paid off, Brittany’s beaches recovered in three to four years.

As the oil spread further, some wag decided to call in the Royal Air Force to bomb the sh*t of it. With the helpS of the Royal Navy, the RAF set fire to the oil with aviation fuel, napalm and other incendiary bombs. It was already too late. Nature gussied up a storm and extinguished the flames almost as soon as Pathé’s cameras stopped rolling. Embarrassingly, despite dropping over 62,000lbs of bombs, the RAF managed to miss the 270 square mile slick 25% of the time. (Perhaps it was the ship they missed – ed.) Questions were asked, lawsuits filed, retrospective studies written, and laws enacted.

Ten Years Later…

Within two days of the eleventh anniversary of the Torrey Canyon’s sinking, on March 16, 1978, the Amoco Cadiz ran aground off the northwest coast of Brittany after its steering failed in a biting gale. Attempts to pull the stricken ship away from land failed and the supertanker struck Portsail Rocks and foundered. Around 220,000 tonnes of oil, almost twice as much as the Torrey Canyon’s, was spilled.

The violent storms that broke up the ship also helped break up the oil slick. Mother Nature thrashed the gooey, toxic mess against the rocks with all the strength she could muster. As the oil blended with water, it lost its buoyancy and started settling on the seabed. Once there, little critters began the laborious task of digesting the oil. In tidal areas, townsfolk poured onto the beaches and carted the oil away by hand as they had done a decade earlier when the Torrey Canyon’s spill washed up. Even with tens of thousands of birds and millions of molluscs killed, after three years the environment started to recover. Where the oil flooded into more stagnant areas, like salt marshes, recovery took almost a decade – just in time for another couple of tankers to break up in winter storms, sink and spill their toxic cargo across the region.

As economically important as tourism was to Brittany, the Amoco Cadiz disaster galvanized the environmental community into action. The conversation evolved from money to natural conservation and preserving a way of life.

Paimpol

Let’s start our tour from the eastern reaches of the Amoco Cadiz’s oil slick. The little town of Paimpol sits high and dry at low tide, miles from the ocean. The harbour is kept afloat by a lock that opens, like so many, on as regular a schedule as the tides can provide. Twice a day the ocean floods across the wide estuary to a depth of five metres raising ships and buoys and allowing passage for sailboats with deep keels. Looking across the sand at low tide makes for an act of faith. Faith that the lock will work and keep the water in the harbour. And faith that it will open again and let you sail out towards the open ocean.

Holidaymakers in Paimpol, like most of Brittany, are predominantly French. From our detailed empirical analysis, we noticed the further west you go the more French things become. By July, intrepid sailors heading for the Mediterranean have long since transited the Straits of Gibraltar. The rest, Brits, Belgians and Germans, sail as far as the Gulf of St. Malo for a few weeks then start heading home again. Sailors from the Channel Islands, Jersey and Guernsey, are the primary representatives of King Charles III.

French dominance brings the benefits of fresher produce and fish in the open markets, along with a bevy of good restaurants with excellent wine lists. Each year the town hosts a small festival of Breton culture at the harbour front. It so happened the weekend we arrived was also the weekend of the festival. A parade of musicians and dancers in traditional black and white garb made their way around the harbour towards a large temporary stage. There teams took turns presenting narrative folk dances.

A good long e-bike ride afforded us a view of the coastline not possible from Aleta. Tiny side roads criss-crossed rolling fields and remained mercifully free of traffic. Every few kilometres brought us to a new cove along the headlands or a new village and a two-thousand-year-old monument in the countryside. Cycling holidays as you can imagine are very popular here. With all the steep dips and hills it would be an adventure for the fit. I recommend bringing strong legs or an electrically assisted velocipede.

Preservation

breton_flag

Breton culture is at risk of dying out. In the 1950s around a million people spoke Breton. Today only around a fifth of that number do. Bilingual education is helping reverse the trend. Still, the average age for a Breton speaker is 59. At the folk festival, the average age of the dancers was at least 70. Spry as the old folks were, only a few under 20s hit the boards. For Breton traditions to survive, the ratio needs to flip.

Breton and Welsh are related linguistically, and Welsh was also at risk of dying out. Then in the 1990s the British invested heavily in bilingual Welsh/English education and made it an official language for the region. About 500,000 people speak Welsh today, roughly the same as 20 years ago. That’s a win in this business. The UK government has set a goal of 1,000,000 Welsh speakers by 2050. With similar investments in Brittany, there is hope for the Breton culture’s survival.

Roscoff Redux

We so enjoyed our visit to Roscoff on our way to the Baltic, we decided to stop there again on our way south. Not much had changed. Although, at the height of summer berths at the marina are a harder to come by. The fog had lifted giving us a great view of Île-de-Batz, an island across the channel that runs at five knots at full flood or ebb. A long jetty stretches out over the water and ends at the little ferry which runs back and forth to the island.

If you stop for lunch, you won’t be disappointed. Last time we dined deliciously at Le Local. This time we went for something a little more French at Les Bricoles. Opting for the three-course prix fixé, we ate dos de cabillaud (cod) washed down with an excellent bottle of Reuilly, Thanks to France’s habit of paying waitstaff a living wage, we were out of there for less than €80. It was one of the best meals we’d had in ages. Take that Olive Garden!

Ushant

Out on France’s furthest reaches lies the small island of Ushant. Or Ouessant if you prefer speaking French. Both names are official. This rocky, bare island sits outside the English Channel and marks the southern edge of the Celtic Sea. Ushant was the last bit of France Napoleon Bonaparte gazed wistfully upon from the deck of HMS Northumberland. He was on his way to lifelong exile and imprisonment on St. Helens, a remote South Atlantic island off the coast of Africa.

Barely ten square miles, fishing has been Ushant’s economic engine for centuries. Sheep farming simply didn’t pay the bills, despite having a species unique to the island. Like their Cornish and Scilly Isles brethren, the fishermen of Ushant knew how to take advantage of their location and sailing skills to supplement their income. At least that’s what the customs officer who boarded Aleta led us to believe. I asked him if they get much action out here. ‘Look around’, he said in his faultless English, ‘you’ve got a remote island, skilled sailors, and the whole of Europe at your doorstep.’ I saw his point.

Ferries at the bottom of the garden

Tourism picks up for a few weeks in the summer. Ferries from Brest and Le Conquet bring families and couples across the ten or so miles of swirling water. The island’s west coast is rugged and jagged enough to make us understand why so many lighthouses were built over the years. At the southwestern tip sits a lighthouse museum that is currently under renovation. Pity, I’m very fond of lighthouses.

From there the rugged coastal trail winds its way in and out of the headland taking you alongside inlets, around puffin nests and even an old hydraulic foghorn, long since abandoned. Under foot sandy rock provides decent grip and low, leafy shrubs close in around your ankles. Suddenly, with a staccato thrup!, thrup! a fawn and brown speckled bird flew up five yards ahead of us, its little wings beating furiously. Most likely a nesting female black grouse. I suspect her forebears were introduced to the island by the Scots who pitched up here starting in the 1750s, around the time of the Highland Clearances. Ye cannae celebrate the Glorious Twelfth weeoot grouse, can ye?

Bay Watch

Outside the main town, Lampaul Bay looks like a wonderfully protected anchorage. It is, save for the westerly swell that creeps in around the corner and makes its way all the way up to the shore. Tides swing 25 – 30 feet here. Timing your trip ashore and strategically tying up your dinghy is no easy task. Arrive at low tide and you can either haul your dinghy up the long ramp to the old lifeboat house or tie it up in the pool below the seawall. The latter option involves scaling one of several rusty iron ladders thirty feet high. Miss a rung at low tide and it’s a dead fall onto the sands and hermit crabs. Either way, once the tide rises, or falls, you still have to relaunch your tender.

TSS

Looming over the cove at the northeastern end of the island stands a huge tower. At the top of the tower is a rotunda that looks like it should be directing air traffic at the nearby airport. Instead, it is controlling shipping traffic entering and leaving La Manche (the English Channel). Every day around 500 ships pass through the Channel making it the world’s busiest shipping lane. The tower and the traffic separation scheme (TSS) just offshore are a direct result of safety improvement after the Amoco Cadiz oil spill.

You see, the Amoco Cadiz was passing Ushant when it slammed its rudder hard to port to avoid hitting another ship. The rudder jammed (poor maintenance) and attempts to repair it failed. As the storm raged, the ship drifted east towards the mainland. A tug fought its way through the heavy seas and managed to attach a steel hawser to the tanker. For five hours with its engines running in full reverse it barely slowed the big ship’s drift. In the tanker was too heavy and the seas too furious and it ran aground 30kms east of where its troubles first started.

Remember the AMOCO

The Amoco Cadiz spilled 220,000 tonnes of oil. That sounds like a lot. And when the oil is floating around like a feral ink blot, it is a lot. Relative to France’s annual oil consumption, though, that’s about a week’s worth (at 2023 rates). Once you delve into the numbers relating to fossil fuel usage you quickly realise how mind-bogglingly ginormous they are. The United States, for example, consumes about 20 million barrels of oil per day.

Examining these early oil shipping disasters, along with others like the Exxon Valdez, certainly steered me towards thinking pipelines are a better option. According to the Fraser institute, compared with trains, trucks and pipelines, supertankers spill the least amount of oil per millions of barrels shipped. That is a result of increased regulation, improved navigational safety (TSS, GPS, AIS) and double-hull tanker designs, oil spillage at sea has dropped from 3.2 million tonnes in the 1970s to 40 thousand tonnes in 2010. That’s good, but a world where Texas Tea stays in Texas would, IMHO, be an even better place.

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Crossing the Chenal du Four a pod of dolphins surfaced and played on Aleta’s bow. If the dolphins are happy, then we are happy.

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