Guernsey to Sark to Dartmouth

Thursday saw a lovely one-hour sail from St Peter Port across to Sark. As warned, the French yachts from the overnight rally from Morlaix were rushing in to try to meet the deadline of tide at the marina entrance; the harbour master's two boats were battling to retain some kind of order so it was good to be away!

We picked up a visitor's mooring in a little anchorage on the west side of Sark called Port Gosselein. The word 'port' suggests rather more than this isolated spot offers - just very steep rocky cliffs, a space to leave your dinghy and some very steep steps onto the high top of the island. We climbed up onto the plateau and soon came to the main road running north-south along the middle of the island - it's just a dusty track with only horses, bicycles and the very occasional tractor! We walked south across to Little Sark, crossing the very precipitous La Coupee (just wide enough for a horse and cart and with stern warnings about No Cycling - you usually get blown over the edge apparently). For us, though, the weather was perfect - bright sunshine so we took lots of photos. Unfortunately we can't share these with you at the moment as my trusty Canon G9 has decided to die on me - I'll need to get a card-reader to retrieve them and post them later. Just got this one from my phone for now:



We had a great lunch of Sark lobster at a lovely but slightly chaotic hotel on Little Sark before walking back to the main village, which comprises just one street with a surprising number of tourist shops, two banks and the island's power station (a large diesel generator in a shed).

We returned to the boat to find a 34ft French boat sharing our mooring, which was fine until a nasty swell rolled into the anchorage and we both started to roll quite a lot but at different frequencies and amplitudes. A nasty crashing of masts was imminent, so our very friendly French neighbours decided to bugger off before we had to ask them so to do. A neighbouring British yacht had to be more forceful with his French charter buoy-mate before they did the right thing; We chatted to his skipper afterwards and it transpired we'd seen them in a previous boat in Schull, SW Ireland two years ago - we'd even emailed them a photo of their boat taken from the top of our mast. Small world!

On Friday morning we left at 9.00 for a really good 70-mile crossing back to Dartmouth. We had a brilliant Force 5 NE so reached across the end of Les Casquets shipping lanes and only had to motor for the last 3 hours as the breeze died as the sun set. We were back on the mooring at about 9.00pm.

We spent Saturday sorting a few jobs aboard, Jayne and Joe came across for supper and we left Maunie, very sadly, on Sunday to return home. After an eventful start, it turned out to be a great cruise and we look forward to revisiting Brittany and the Channel Islands later this year if possible.