You got the con, dude!

Bart (our new deck hand) and I really do make a good bridge team. I gave him an introductory course on the Decca radar, and in short order he was tracking all targets and calling out interesting CPA's as they came up on the screen. In the first day he pretty much mastered the rest of the essential bridge electronics, and my role was reduced to sitting with my feet up, calculating course changes on the Transas and calling out heading changes. We're both still getting a kick out of conning a proper motor ship. Good times all around.

We departed St. Malo for Brest on Sunday morning with only a few meters per second from the north-west, the North Atlantic lapping gently on our starboard side. As we approached Cap Frehel across the bay, Bart called the whole crew to the bridge for the magnificent view. It got quite crowded, with oohs and aahs nearly blanketing out my steering commands.

Given the extreme tides combined with a chaotic bottom topography, keeping the ship on course has been a bit of a challenge along the coast of Brittany. The autopilot does a brilliant job of keeping the ship's head on track, but the currents keep pushing us off, sometimes by as much as thrity degrees in a short moment.

After we rounded Cap Frehel, the old Decca Bridgemaster radar's screen went blank, and the set issued a nasty burnt smell. At this, José decided to cut our journey short, and we put into St-Quay-Portrieux. On the approach, the door to the bridge suddenly decided that it wouldn't open any more, and shortly thereafter the four GPSes on board suddenly lost their signal. We later figured out that one of the French fishing boats in the vicinity must have put a jammer on us (Motherfuckers!), but at the time we had more than enough with making the rather tricky approach on visual nav only.

We stayed in Portrieux just long enough to re-provision, and set off the next morning for Brest. Once we got into open water, we hit a moderate but short sea straight ahead, and some of the guests got uncomfortable.

Yet again it was decided to cut our journey short, and we made our way down to Lesardrieux. It proved to be a fantastically idyllic little place, but the town had nothing to offer, save for a sad "Bar du Yacht" filled with arrogant locals who clearly didn't like the looks of Bart and myself in our working clothes. Thus, we made another early morning departure, making for La Rochelle.

At the time of this writing, we are meeting a Force 7 head on, with 2-3 meter waves, but these are not the conditions when I get my camera out to document it. The inclinometer doesn't lie, though. It has been decided to put into Roscoff for the night.

...

So we finally made it to La Rochelle. The sea got almost spectacular, developing into a solid 3.5 meter chop, rising very steeply as the Atlantic met the continental shelf on an opposing tide. At last I got to see the wave plow do its bit, a fantastic sight as the ship picked up a ton or two of green water on the fore peak, then dispersing it into a heavy spray that made the bridge shudder with the impact as she pitched back. Further into the Bay of Biscay the sea settled down to a solid five meter swell, giving us almost dry decks, but presenting challenges of its own as we turned south-west and took it on our starboard quarter. The autopilot really had its work cut out for it then, but the Yaw and Rudder settings on max kept us on a zig-zag course for the goal.

Luckily, it all passed without mechanical calamity, aside from a little scare as the Kubota generator dropped a phase. Thank god for backups! Now we're settled securely into the locked harbor, Bart and myself busy with all the little jobs that accumulate at sea, planning for our upcoming layup period, when The Man will be away and we'll be working hard to get her ship-shape for the dash south into the Med.