Sailing with Amy Clair

  Vannes market is great with so much food (and other stuff) displayed wonderfully   The Duc de Bretagne doesn't look too happy I don't think we have many hat shops left in the UK but in France...... ..

Happily French buses , though infrequent, are comfortable and cheap. We took the one hour ride from Crouesty to Vannes at only €1.50 each !

Happily the weather has really cooperated during Abbi's visit. Lovely weather on Noirmoutier followed by a couple of really nice sailing days. We had originally planned to take the short hop back to Pornic (easy for getting to Nantes airport) but we all wanted to take advantage of the nice sailing weather; first to go from Noirmoutier to la Turballe and then from there to le Crouesty. Both days were really good sailing - so much so that I forgot to take any pictures !

We do seem to be doing a lot of cycling this year . It's just that they are such a great way to explore the many small islands off the Brittany coast.

Another tick in the box for Le Crouesty . They have really thought through cycling in the area and using a combination of traffic free and quiet roads we saw quite a lot of the region

Our plan was to head south over a few days and to pick up Abbi at Pornic - becasue this is easily accessible from the airport at Nantes. However with sailing wetaher and tides always has a part to play. In this case we were experiencing extremely high spring tides. This meant that they go very high (as above) but also very low (next photo). Also meant that the port that we planned to stay at en route to Pornic was not accessible for a boat of our depth. Hmmm... So we had to leave it a few days until the tides had moderated and we were able to get in !

 France is a truly blessed country. From Brittany and Normandy in the North, through Aquitaine and down to the Mediterranean. There is so much space. Whilst both France and the UK have similar populations of 66m , France has a surface area approximately 2 1/2 times that of the UK. 

At Port Haliguen we were intrigued to see lots of people out on the rocks at low tide with buckets. We went to take a look and , unlike their British counterparts, they were not just "rockpooling" they were very actively searching for very small crabs - which they seemed to find by the bucket load. Not sure exactly how you eat the little blighters but everyone seemed to be going away with at least one bucket full - suprised there are any left !