Day 34 Monday 26th June 2017
Roscoff
Collect our baguette and croissants from the office first thing and later go to the Bar on the Marina for coffee and good wifi (for weather and blog posting). Spend a lot of time after lunch talking about the weather for this week and deciding what to do: go to Perros Guirec and Lezardrieux or Morlaix? Perros Guirec has a lock which only opens HW plus or minus 1 ½ hours at springs, less at neaps and you may end up being caught inside as it can close for days (‘being neaped’). Not ideal for catching a plane from Guernsey. In the end we decide to go to Morlaix tomorrow, which was always our original intention. David Sykes, friend and intrepid sailor, highly recommended it when we were planning our route in the winter. Morlaix is up a river and sheltered from the bad weather approaching from WNW over the next few days. There’s lots to see and do here and a toilet to unblock – so that should keep us occupied.
Set out to walk into Roscoff but Malcolm gets distracted by the Uship chandlery just outside the marina in case they have the pipes for the toilet. They do have the pipe but not the coupler he needs so a very helpful young man with excellent English sends us off to another chandler. There’s no shop at this one so we’ll go back to Uship, but in the meanwhile we stumble across the footpath that takes you round the point. There’s a very pretty little Chapelle de Ste. Barbe (1619), which the Roscoff Johnnies used to salute three times on their way to England to sell their strings of onions. There are two gendarmes up here and two cameramen with very powerful lenses but we can’t figure out what’s going on.
A view in both directions of the Bay of Morlaix to the east and the passage we came down yesterday, the Chenal de Batz, to the west. It looks very rocky and shallow at a Springs low tide.
In front of us there’s a fort, originally Roman, now Vauban (again!). And Les Viviers de Roscoff, founded in 1860, with a seawater reservoir for crustaceans. Between 1866 and 1875, 40,000 crabs and lobsters passed through the reservoir before being delivered by train to Paris or by schooner to Ostend. It’s now owned by a fish trading company.
Carry on into Roscoff town, which we really liked last year, and discover some more old houses and carvings and a row of fishing boats hanging off the harbour wall.
Then, after a hasty beer, hotfoot it back to Uship to purchase the pipe.
Make a meal with the very last of our Brest delivery: Merguez sausages on a bed of courgettes and onions, new potatoes and carrots, followed by some cakes I found earlier in the Boulangerie in Brest, a chocolate muffin and a Breton Far (custard tart).
And we found another Verl 900 on the same pontoon as us!
