Next up: France! Our stop in France was exactly 2 months long but the first month we spent sailing the coast from Belgium to La Trinite, where we had boat work scheduled! Turns out, the French coast is longggg.

Some highlights along the way were definitely the islands on the coast of Bretagne but also the beautiful Channel Islands! We wished we had more time around the archipelago in the English Channel but were lucky enough to stop at Alderney and Herm for a few days!

Given our boat work schedule, we had to keep moving and our next stop was another incredible one as we docked at Saint Malo and drove to the famous Mont Saint-Michel.

A few days later of historical land expeditions, we ended up at Ile de Batz - the cutest little island. We rented some bikes and cycled around the island, ate some crepes and of course had some Breton cider! I think the Island knew we enjoyed it so much that when we tried to turn the motor on, it wouldn’t start! “ECU error” is all we knew and after many calls to the country reps, they still couldn’t figure it out - who knew it would take us 28 days to have this issue identified and resolved!

The challenge still remained - we had a lot of ground to cover, a tight timeline for our scheduled boat work, strong currents, rough seas, storms, crazy tides and marinas to dock into with one engine!

Over the next 10 days, a lot of careful planning had to be done to ensure we could enter marinas with space for us on an easy to park dock as well as weather planning because we didn’t know if we’d be losing the second engine too?

We finally reached La Trinite and ongoing boat work went on from the 26th Aug to the 19th Sept. Boat work included our solar panel and battery installs, hauling out to replace some anodes and get some new anti fouling. The upside was we got to spend a month with our friends who lived in town that we hadn’t seen in years!

What was initially a 2 week job, quickly turned into 4, and once it was all done we couldn’t believe we were now on our next mission - get to the Canary Islands by the 11th Nov to join the ARC for preparations to cross the Atlantic! It all started to feel real!

We explored a couple more scenic islands before dashing to La Rochelle, our last stop in France! It was a busy stop and we luckily got a slip, as we had arrived just a few days before the boat show. La Rochelle Marina is also one of the largest in Europe with 5000 berths so it was awesome to see so many Catamarans (we had been mostly the only ones in the North Sea and English Channel for a while!).

At this stage, Orcas had started to attack yachts in the Bay of Biscay (where we were). We had heard of boats being attacked in the middle of the night on the Biscay crossing and that was something that was not what we wanted for many reasons:

a) The Bay of Biscay is notorious for its rough seas due to weather conditions and its shallow continental shelf so much so that boat crew named it “Valley of Death” during WWII.

b) Orcas were damaging or breaking off yacht rudders which disables steering for the vessel and in rough seas, that’s not what you want either!

c) If we did sustain any damage, we would have to find and make our way to a port that would be able to haul us out and get them repaired which would have meant we wouldn’t make it for our ARC Atlantic Crossing deadline as we were on a tight schedule!

So, we decided not to cross the whole Bay of Biscay and instead did our first overnight and 2 day passage to Loredo, Spain. To this day, it was one of the most brutal night sails we’ve done! We left La Rochelle on the tail end of a weather front, until we managed to angle down towards Spain. Our next challenge now was to find breaks in the storms that had started to sweep through the bay throughout September and try to make as much progress as we could through the Spanish coast!