Saint-Vaast-la-Hogue

Position: 49°35’16.6″N 1°15’48.8″W

Turning back the clock a couple of weeks, it is time to bring you up to date on our adventures between Dieppe and Paimpol. One of the nicest anchorages on the Cherbourg peninsula sits just outside the little town of Saint-Vaast-la-Hogue. On our way to the Baltic a couple of years ago we dropped our hook in this placid, wide bay that is well protected from the west and the north. With a nice sandy bottom our anchor dug in immediately and even with a 25-foot tide, the currents didn’t trouble Aleta.

If you don’t know, Aleta isn’t fond of currents. She gets a bit discombobulated and turns her bow away from the wind and ends up unnaturally beam-, or even stern-to. Sometimes she’ll run over her anchor in a fit of pique. At times like that I’ll extend the snubber (the rope and tackle that takes pressure off the windlass) so the chain doesn’t tickle her keel too much.

On this outbound leg of our journey Carol had made an important appointment in St.-Vaast-la-Hogue. She had ordered a new dinghy and reasoned that Cherbourg was a good a place as any to collect it. Until the dealer pointed out that they weren’t in Cherbourg at all, but in St. Vaast. Life tossed us a lemon, and we happily made lemonade with it.

Technical Sailing

Some areas of the world are made for idle sailing. The Mediterranean Sea is one such body of water. Sure there are Mistrals and Meltemis, strong winds that appear suddenly out of nowhere and will knock your mast onto the water if you’re not careful. But that’s about it. No tides exist and no need to plan for them. Better still, no tidal currents try and spin you around. Aside from watching the weather and how much anchor line the Dutchman in front of you let out, there’s nothing difficult about sailing the Med.

Northern France and Southern England demands attention. It is what I call ‘technical sailing’. Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve described some of the challenges with tides, currents, and weather. Together these elements demand detailed planning and attention to changes while underway. Then you have to adjust your plans as local conditions change. For every goal we set, say a 50-mile crossing, we also identified at least one, preferably two, alternate goals in case the first became unobtainable. The wind might die and we might delay turning on the engine for too long, so the afternoon currents might slow us down even more than expected and, and, and…

Research is essential. Typically, local advice is summarized in a regional cruising guide. These days, the market for up-to-date cruising guides is giving way to blogs, magazine articles, and chat rooms. That Balkanization of information is true for both English and French sources. Since the French, arguably, know more about sailing in their country than the Brits do, the problem of too many sources and too little time opens a door for Artificial Intelligence. Turns out my go-to AI site Perplexity.ai does a darn good job distilling all that sage advice into something comprehensible. It helps to have experience with the subject matter (we do), and Perplexity usefully offers all of its sources up for review.

Locked Out and In

My buddy Mark says, “I always thought of the tides changing as the world breathing “. Up here she’s drawing deep breaths. St.-Vaast was our first experience with a lock harbour where the sea drained away completely. In preparation, we arrived the night before and waited for the tide to rise and the lock to open. Once tied up inside the neatly organized marina with its generous spacing between docks, we contacted our dealer and arranged a time for our as-yet-unnamed dinghy to be delivered. That gave us a bit of time to explore the town and re-provision. Walking through the narrow lanes and looking out across the wide tidal plain, I got the impression this was a place happily off the beaten track. A few fishermen continued working their craft, but the rest of the town was busily working the tourist trade and boat repair businesses.

Apéro

In one of only three stores that sold wines, we learned the expression ‘apéro. This particular emporium was stocked with gourmet goodies like black olive tapenade and asparagus compote. In the wine section a dozen hand-picked reds and whites suitable for apéro were on display. Apéro is short for apéritif. It is why the drink Aperol is so named^[1]. Apéro is the French version of England’s ‘high tea’. Rather than drinking lukewarm Earl Grey and munching stale, crustless sandwiches, the French gather together around cocktail hour (that’s 5:00PM for you heathens too young to remember such traditions) and enjoy drinks and light snacks before dinner. This sounded wholly civilized and quite lovely.

Dinner in France generally starts around 8:00PM, unless you’re a gourmand when it can start much later. At our advanced ages, apéro inevitably becomes a proxy for dinner, but who cares? Gather up some tasty local cheeses and saucisses (if you’re into that sort of thing) and a good bottle of Pouilly Fumé and you’ve done something productive for the day.

Axey

Two strapping lads lugged our new dinghy down the dock and launched her. She is a 3D Tender 265. An inflatable with an aluminium hull. She is third dinghy we’ve owned, thus fulfilling a prophecy I had read about in Cruising World a decade ago: that every long-distance cruiser is dissatisfied with their dinghy and will try every kind to find the right one. This one, we’ll call her Axey for reasons I’ll explain in a moment, is a combination of a hard shell (like Teddy, our first dinghy) and an inflatable. That gives her speed and manoeuvrability with the added bonus of stability. Nellie, our Porta-bote, was semi-rigid at best. While she had many positive features, durability in salt water wasn’t one of them. We have high hopes for Axey. (Axe in French is short for annexe and signifies the dinghy belongs to a bigger boat.)

Photos

Here are some photos of Saint-Vaast-le-Hogue to induce envy and spark curiosity about this lovely corner of Normandy. The hybrid bus/ferry was perhaps the coolest thing on four wheels I’d seen in some time. Once the tide comes in, it takes passengers to the islands across the bay. It does not drive across the tidal pools when the water runs out.

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^[1] I’ve never tasted Aperol. Given that beverage’s marketing hype, the chance of me knocking a shot or two back anytime soon is slim. I think I fell into its evil trap by mentioning it. If they send me a bottle or two for plugging it, I’ll let you know what it tastes like.

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