Île de Batz
Tags: France, Île de Batz, sailing
Date: September 19, 2016
After Tréguier, we went to Île de Batz which is not too far along the coast. As the name implies, it is an island off the coast. It has a big harbor area where you can just anchor pretty much where you like. Since Amanda has a lifting keel it is able to stand on the bottom. We had never tried that, but got the chance here since the harbor has about five meters of water at high tide and is entirely dried out at low tide.
Ideally, we would have like to dry out in the daylight, but due to the timing of the tides, we ended up doing it late in the evening after dark. Here the water is falling:
We had anchored close to a beach with a little wind blowing us toward the beach. This meant that the front of Amanda was facing away from the coast. It turns out that the boat is built for being the other way around, so we slept at a bit of an angle that night, but it was no problem.
Next day we turned Amanda around to face the beach:
This is how the back looks:
You can see the two daggerboards sticking out at an angle on either side otf the rudder. The daggerboards can be raised and lowered and are used to fine tune the sailing. You can also see the propeller and the swim ladder.
Other boats use other tactics for drying out:
The harbor is a big area that entirely dries out at low water. At high water it just looks like a normal harbor but at low water it looks like this:
Here is a closeup of the church:
There was a really nice botanical garden on the island:
This is where parsley is grown: