By: Noah D.
Didn’t your mother ever tell you not to go down dark alleyways? You don’t know what could be lurking behind the next corner!?
So much of cruising like this is made up of coming to terms with the unknown. I don’t care what website you look at for the weather, rarely do they agree and they are often accurate only to +/-5kts of windspeed. “Local conditions may differ.” Indeed.
The closest thing to clairvoyance is the Reed’s Almanac. I will rue the day we get out of its blue and gold reach: a day that is fast approaching with every south-facing passage. Without intending to sound like an advertisement, the Reeds Almanac is the best £64 I’ve spent in a long time… the random little ports and the off-path anchorages are hardly a mystery. Couple Reed’s with updated Navionics and, dang, no place is off limits to Proteus.
Or, rather, we know if the place is off limits to Proteus.
The Raz du Sein (pronounced; “Raah duh Seh”) is one more of those places in the Biscay that imbue it with is alarming reputation. For those who have no knowledge of the Atlantic Coast of France, perhaps it is better that you don’t – especially my friends and family that have misgivings about me sailing 7000 miles – but there is more freaky stuff around here than the Bermuda Triangle. One place, in particular, is the Raz, a tiny strait between the Ile-de-Sein and a promontory on the mainland. The Raz is a boat-eater: one of two, actually, within a few hundred miles of each other off this coast (the other is called the Rochebonne Plateau, a place marked on most charts as “AREA TO BE AVOIDED”).
The lesser of the two scaries is our new friend, The Raz. Less scary, I say, but definitely worthy of respect. The Raz is actually an underwater rock feature in which massive amounts of water bottleneck and run back and forth with each switch of the tide. Occasionally, the tidal current can flow at as much as 6kts to 8kts and throw an extremely confused sea. The ONLY time to cross it safely is the 30 minutes on either side of high or low water: the less-than-one-hour in which the tide is slack. (I should mention, by the way, that it takes about an hour to pass through.) On our first attempt from Brest, the wind was over tide and a swell was running north-south through the gate. Before we got too close, we realized the conditions were horrible and had to turn back east and make for Douarnenez.
For our next attempt, there was practically no storm swell coming in off the deep Atlantic and the wind was blowing across. We timed it within 15 minutes after sailing 18 miles from Douarnenez, made the gateway as if we were flushed down a drain, and parked ourselves at Audierne for a few hours of sleep before continuing south the next morning.
Having now done so many many miles in high latitudes, sailing in Force 5 and Force 6 is becoming somewhat of a norm. Even so, we don’t watch the anemometer hit upper-30’s very often. Squall after squall passed us. At the end of the day, we had a max gust hold at 39kts. It made for an exhilarating downwind run to Belle-Ile. Double reefs in both main and jib while running, Proteus held mid-7’s through the water for most of the day, getting us to Belle-Ile and into the locked basin with minutes to spare.
These are the days that break from any semblance of normalcy the days that – even at sea – are out of the ordinary. Moments when the sky is dark and the sea seems to be illuminating itself from beneath the boat. Moment where 10 foot walls of water approach from behind and gently slide beneath the transom. Moments when birds fly calmly by at eye-level in a perfect V-shape… only this time the wind is sustaining 32kts. Or moments miles out at sea when you can barely make out the top of the sails for all the rain and thick fog: “Is that an engine I hear? Maybe it is the vibration of the hull through the water?” The surreal is only real because it is right there in front of you, but if you were to write it down or interject it into story-time it might seem too fantastic to be true.
The monster of the sea is the sea itself. The stories of beasts in them thar waters, mateee, are cooked because the calm thing you see lapping the warm sand cannot be the same that eats ships without a trace. Of course it must be the Cracken! Of course it must be the Edge of the World! The Raz and its ilk cannot be conquered, only eased by when the monster turns over in his sleep. And upon Mother Earth with all her glorious nesting beasts becoming agitated from time to time, Proteus is making its way quietly along, its presence erased only moments after passing like the dim candle in the hallway held tightly against the draft.
