As we were warned, fog is common on the Bretagne coast and rolls in without warning. Today was one of those days, we got up in the morning and it was like the proverbial pea soup. It appeared to be lifting by midday so we motored out to the “Libenter buoy”, but visibility was still only about 150-200m, so about turn…back to the river we go, bursting back into brilliant sunshine. We dropped anchor for an hour and had some lunch. A budgie landed on the boom…where he came from “je ne sais pas”, as I don’t think they are a native bird. Anyhow he stayed for lunch, tweeted his goodbye and flew off. Again we tried to head out through the fog only to be turned around again, as a couple of fishing boats coming into port came out of the mist and passed by a little too close for my liking. Time to call it a day and try again tomorrow.
The following morning wasn’t as bad as the previous day and the fog lifted about mid morning, again we motored down river past the main entrance marker called “Le Petit pot de Beurre”……which directly translates to “The little pot of butter”…The French put a name on most of their larger buoys, I presume so you can positively identify them at night and in reduced visibility, this one made me laugh. I digress…..again the fog was a little too thick for our liking so we turned back and anchored in the same spot we had done of the previous day….a case of ”déjà vu”. This time we had morning tea and no budgie…. An hour or two later the fog was clearing so we headed off again, visibility was down to about 200-300m, so we slowly motored our way towards Ile de Ouessant, fourth time lucky. As we were motoring along, we were approaching a fisherman on a port to port passing with a reasonable distance between us. At about 50m from the passing point he cut straight across our bows and missed us by about 20m only because we bore hard to port to miss him. He wasn’t at the helm, he was alone and was working on some fishing gear on the stern of his boat. He didn’t seem to think there was a problem as I hurled a torrent of abuse at him……lesson learnt give these guys a wide berth…. The visibility continued to improve until once again, we were in brilliant sunshine….we arrived at the “Baie le Stiff” (yes this is the name) by early afternoon… Launching the dinghy we rowed ashore and walked into town, a short stroll of about 3 miles. We then decided to hire some pushbikes for the rest of the afternoon and had a look around. About 17:00 as we headed back to the boat a cold north easterly wind started to blow, we heard the fog horns and then the “FOG” rolled back in again over the cliffs….just like in the movie….spooky……
Onboard again, we both had a quick shower. I was showering on the transom using the outdoor shower in the fog. No bullshit…. it lifted and about 100 people standing on the wharf waiting to catch the tourist ferry had full view of a soapy arse, I acted like a true frenchman and carried on unperturbed (they don’t seem to have a problem about stopping for a leak in just about any corner). Another boat was anchored on the adjacent mooring about 30m away, I noticed a dolphin at the bow who appeared to be caught in the mooring lines, my first thought was to dive in to help him, as I was convinced he was in trouble. He wasn’t in trouble and soon ducked below the surface and disappeared. About 5 minutes later we heard a splash at our bow, we quietly moved forward and found the dolphin rubbing himself against our mooring lines. He stayed there for about 10 minutes whilst we talked to him. We swear he was smiling at us, so we nicknamed him ‘smiley’ (see photos). He must hang around the bay quite a bit, as he didn’t seem to be afraid of us and appeared to enjoy the interaction….or found us amusing……Anyhow, it was a pretty special evening and made our day. Ile de Ouessant turned on a mixture of experiences that we will remember for quite a while.