Category: Atlas

Monday 5th June 2023

The day of our departure had arrived. We were anchored to the south of the small island Bréhat on the north coast of Brittany, west of Saint-Malo.

From here, we plan to sail directly for Greenland. Critically, that means that this is our very last stop in France – and therefore our last chance to stock up on the delicious fresh bread, pastries and croissants available at every boulangerie, which we have become accustomed to over the last few weeks.

We ready the dinghy and head ashore, leaving the dinghy tied to a ring on the harbour wall, just across from where the ferry from the mainland is discharging its passengers, our skipper among them.

The island is a small bucolic paradise. Lush and green, filled with surprising formations of pink granite around the coast, houses with beautiful gardens, the only motor traffic consisting of small tractors. We reach the centre of the village, where the restaurants are already filling up and serving lunch. We linger at the bakery, taking yet one more thing to enjoy and keep us going.

Returning to the coast, we see our dinghy still happily tied up at the dock. We join the skipper and a friend who lives on the island for a drink. The waitress informs us that they have fresh local mussels, the first of the season. Drinks become lunch. We are well prepared, plan to leave with the high tide in the evening, and in no hurry to leave the delights of Brittany behind.

Ah yes, the tide. In this part of the world, the tidal range is extraordinarily high, the water level able to change by more than 10m in the roughly six hours between low and high tides. The tidal range varies over the month in correspondence with the phase of the moon – the alignment of the moon and the sun. It is just coming to full moon, and as such we are close to springs, a period of high tidal range.

As we sit on that sunny terrace overlooking the bay, ordering lunch, we see these effects in action. Our dinghy is no longer afloat; instead, it is sitting on a muddy shoreline. The ferry is no longer able to collect its passengers here, but must use another dock further away by the rocky cliffs, where the water is deeper.

As we wait for the food, as it arrives, as we eat, we can see the water receding out of the bay.

By the time we pay the bill and feel ready to leave, it is 15 minutes before low water. The bay of boats bobbing at their moorings has drained to a muddy basin, the boats standing in the mud on their keels and legs, leaning to one side or the other.

We walk to the dinghy and take a grasp of our situation. We couldn’t have chosen a worse time to leave. We have a long muddy walk ahead of us, carrying the heavy dinghy with its solid aluminium floor, large outboard motor and additional fuel tank.

The skipper has, wisely, brought his sea boots. The rest of us are wearing… crocs. We remove our socks, roll up our trousers and make our way down the steps to the mud.

Squelch. The mud grips onto our shoes, sucking them down, unwilling to let them go. Every step requires a forceful movement upwards and, importantly, forward, to prevent merely pulling your foot free and leaving the shoes stuck in the mud, where they are quickly covered by the liquid mud.

Our local friend takes pity on us and comes down from the wall to assist us. After a few steps, mud threatens to pour into his short hiking boots, he wisely makes a swift retreat to the reassuring solidity of the harbour wall.

We resume our journey to the water, leaving the land behind. Is this our last impression of land or our first of water? This mud has only a tenuous claim to be called ‘land’, given that most of the time it forms the sea bed of this bay.

On closer inspection, this surface is also much more than just mud. There is much mud to be sure, but interspersed with rocks and pebbles, multiple varieties of seaweed, shells and crabs discarded after their tasty contents have been eaten, and signs of life that have so far escaped that fate. The surface is shaped by the water regularly flowing over it, creating channels, depositing material.

We stagger and flail, laughing and crying for short breaks, loose shoes temporarily to the mud left and right, we take zigzag turns, trying to avoid the deepest-looking parts.

We pass through channels which still hold a little water, enough for its buoyancy to share our load. We push the dinghy through these channels, the mud washing out of our crocs as we wade through the startlingly clear salt water, filled with a variety of seaweed, the bottom of hard sand.

We reach the shallow water’s edge without any major comic mishap, alas; nobody manages to slip and fall head first into the mud. Open water, enough water to at last take the full load of the dinghy from us. We kick the water to clear our shoes and legs of the worst of the dirt, clamber aboard one by one, and motor out of the bay towards Atlas. She is riding at her anchor, waiting to take us to Greenland when the flood returns.

– Alex

Passage notes, 10 June 2023, 1015UTC

Today is probably the sixth day at sea. Probably? Who could say, exactly. The succession of days and nights pass like the wave tops and troughs under our boat. Time ceased to be of importance, distances lost their meaning, only direction counts, and keeping the boat sailing, ever in motion, ever towards the destination beyond the horizon. We are in flow. The rhythm of the passage has embraced us.

The engine is humming today. With its 6 cylinders, a reassuring constant murmuring has been with us for the past night and this morning. The wind has ceased yesterday evening, with the low south to us, which had powered the airflow, slowly filling and diminishing. It left us with a reminder of damp air thick as yoghurt.

We are enveloped in fog, so dense you can touch it. Materialising in the finest of droplets settling on the skin as one steps outside from the near tropical warmth of the cabin. The heating coupled to the engine coolant circuit brought the inside temperature up over night and the moisture down while outside a thick blanket of vapour surrounds us. We move our own disk of visibility, which is ever so slowly increasing since last night, when we could barely see much farther than our bow and a few meters past our stern. Truly in our own little world. A bit like the white ‘room’ in the film The Matrix, only not quite so bright.

Near the boat, the water has a dark-greenish tinge, petrol called at times. A blue-green not saturated as it were if the sun would penetrate, but carrying rather a hint of colour. As we look towards the edges of our horizon, we see the long swell slowly peeling away from the mist. The wave tops at times disappearing once more in the fog, returning into the white for a brief moment before peeling for real and rolling ahead.

Between the boundary of our vision and the boat, the undulating hills of water seem to become ever more transparent the farther they are from the boat, a gradient of white overlaying the scene and fading it out around the edges. The water mirrors the white dome above and around us, but it is not devoid of colour. If we look closely, we see the hints of blueish-green in each of the wavelets’ faces. A landscape far from monotone if repetitive in its varying patterns.

The slowly rolling long hills of water put me in mind of the Champagne, which we drove through on our road trip to the boat in St Malo from Switzerland. On the way, we stopped in the medieval town of Troyes to meet our lovely friends Jean-Luc and Marie for a short and sweet reunion and being treated to their incredible hospitality and culinary delights. They bought an old stone house full of character that they have been rebuilding for over a year. We had seen the house at Easter last year, helping with carrying out 200kg heaters, as we were there in an opportune moment, and feasting on the most buttery croissants and cheese. The transformation the house has gone through since is remarkable, a true gem they turned it into, their attention to detail and care showing in each corner.

Today is Saturday, 10th June, 10:15UTC, the tablet says. We are all up now, some having had breakfast earlier, some now. A by now customary bowl of boat-made yoghurt with oats, apples, toasted nuts and seeds, dried fruit and granola makes the lion share of our brekkies. Alex and I have been making our yoghurt for years, since we first were given a culture by sailing friends in Portugal in October 2019. This culture we lost just as we arrived in Tobago end of February 2020.

As luck wanted it, we met a friendly boat that gifted us another culture within a few days which has been with us ever since. A Turkish strand that Tali and Werner of SY Umadum picked up on their journey in South Africa, and took across the southern Atlantic to Brazil and all the way up to to Tobago, where we met. Since, the yoghurt has become our pet of kinds, and we have taken it everywhere we went ever since. Weather on passage, in high waves, in the tropics, in the Swiss mountains, on holiday in the Canaries, it always works!

When we had left for France, we forgot our yoghurt prepared and ready to take. On our stop-over in Bern with Linda and Thom, they helped mitigate the shock and find a wonderful solution. As it happens, Thom did his PhD on gene-sequencing of yoghurt cultures. Is not world a funny place, full of interesting coincidences? Thom suggested sending a letter with dried and wet yoghurt samples to France per express post. And that’s just what we did.

Rafael, our new friend who is looking after our flat while we are away, carefully dried two samples of our yoghurt, and send off a package. We eagerly awaited it, expecting to have it in our hands any day. We waited and waited, and it didn’t arrive. Cryptic updates in the tracking service didn’t reveal its destiny. But arrive it did, eventually. The day before sailing day!

Meanwhile, being without yoghurt, we had found a tasty one at the goat farm neighbouring the boat yard where we worked long hours to get Atlas ready for the sea. This farm yoghurt turned out successful too, so now we are blessed with two yoghurt cultures, and having grown attached to both, we keep both of them going. And not a bad thing, given the rate at which we are eating it!

Arnaud, our captain, always wonderfully gracious with praise, says that being able to make our own fresh yoghurt as we go along is one of the major upgrades of the season. 😉

Passage notes, morning watch, 8 June 2023, 0700UTC

It’s the fourth day on passage and I’m standing in the Atlas’ pilot house gazing out of the large glass windows we meticulously resealed before setting off. As the waves pass from under our starboard quarter towards the west, I’m contemplating their fractal intricacies and modulations.

The preparation weeks in the boat yard of Minihic-sur-Rance and the marina of Bas Sablons already seem a long while away as we have fallen into the rhythm of passage making: sailing, eating, sleeping, contemplating, living in motion, meandering in and out of being together and being apart as each takes their watch.

Our route takes us north of west as we sail from France towards the shores of SW Greenland. The wind direction is unexpectedly out of NE to ENE. Earlier this year we had talked about beating upwind all the way: we’re bang in the zone of Westerly winds after all, ushering the weather systems and lows across the Atlantic from the American to the European shores. This year is different.

Atlas rolls to the waves that are reminiscent of Twoflower’s first Atlantic crossing in the trade winds. Heaving up and down with the waves passing underneath, rolling – gently most times, violently at others – with the sea boarding the leeward scuppers, washing along the bulwarks before gushing out of the fairleads frothing our wake.

The giant bronze propeller polished mirror-like before going into the water, spins in sync with Atlas’ motion through the water. An undulating background humming accompanying us at all times. It evokes in my mind memories of riding the open nostalgic cable cars in the precipitous canton of Uri in Switzerland. Often older than any of us, meticulously maintained, they take four people up the mountain in an open basket suspended over the cliffs. As they ascend and descend the mountain, they hum akin to Atlas’ prop.

Whenever near a stanchion, the cable car’s speed drops and with it the mechanical humming transmitted through the cables in unison with the carriage’s wheels turning on the guide rail just above. As we slow down just before the stanchion, the cabin riding up to it from its suspended ride in the cable, the hum drops an octave. A short breath hold — a pause in a musical piece, preceding the next crescendo — before both the cable car and the humming gain momentum in unison having passed the stanchion and continuing its journey up, ever up.

Atlas sings to a variant of the melody. A joint piece of the natural and the mechanical. We lift up from astern. Atlas gathers her skirts, surfing forward on the wave’s face. As if sat on a wooden swing slung over the branch of a stately oak tree, she’s given an inviting push by an invisible hand, surging forward joyfully before gently slowing down after the crest passed. Smiling to herself, awaiting the next wave, she is ready to swing again. Each wave, each motion a modulation of the preceding.

The wind and sea have calmed down since my last watch in the night. The Genoa I partially furled is out at its fullest once more, pulling along Atlas steadily towards our destination. The crew is asleep.

Angie