Ile d’Yeu to La Rochelle 63nm
Sunday 26 July
The weather forecast was a bit disappointing and we were fully expecting to have to motor down to La Rochelle.
Thankfully the forecast was wrong, as usual, and we had a lovely 14knt wind coming from the North West pushing us along quite nicely.
We had Lily up and the wind got stronger until we were storming along at up to 11 knots – we were using Greta (autohelm) to see how she’d get on. I could see that as the gusts got up to 20knts she was struggling a bit, and I should have taken over.. so we broached, quite beautifully.
Sam had apologised for a broach yesterday that neither David or I had noticed. This was a proper one with La Bamba almost on her side. We dumped the spinnaker sheet and she soon popped back up.
For those wondering, a broach is when the boat gets overpowered and veers up suddenly to windward, the volume of wind in the downwind sails (the main and the spinnaker) makes the boat tip right over and the helm loses control.
I took the helm off Greta and used my dinghy sailing skills to waggle the rudder to get purchase so we could get back downwind again.
We quite enjoyed the broach as it showed that La Bamba can take this sort of thing in her stride. Nothing bad happened down below either.
We did decide to furl Lily… it was a bit blowy for her! Typically after David had stowed her neatly in the bag, the wind dropped down again to 12-14 knots.
Eventually we put Lily back up, and as soon as we did the wind started to build again! David sensibly decided to drop her when we hit 13knots with gusts up to 20 again and there was a rather threatening sky.
Yo-yo Lily today!
Then we continued to storm along with the Yankee at about 8-10 knots. It rained a light spitting rain on us.
We soon saw the sandy beaches of the Ile de Re.
We have decided to stay 2 nights here to stock up for an overnight passage to Spain and get a bit of a rest.
We are staying in the most enormous marina which has catamarans as wide as they are long! And two huge dinghy launching ramps – very impressive.
We took the sea bus into pretty La Rochelle and had a delicious meal.
We were very glad we weren’t moored in the old harbour (tidal issues) as there was an incredibly loud Sunday night disco booming across the docks. It did finish at 11, so not too bad.
