St Malo Ville Intra Muros and St Servan

The entrance to Granville’s marina is through a sill which has enough depth for us to escape three hours either side of high water.  For once we were ship shape and ready to leave in good time and spent the rest of the morning watching the large digital indicator whose readout indicates the depth over the sill.  As the indicator rose above two metres we cast off and set a course for St Malo.

The sea was glassy and visibility so good that we could see all the way to Mont-St-Michel to the South and Iles Chaussey to the North.  The latter is an archipelago of rocks, possibly hundreds, almost all of which cover at high water and just one that is inhabited.  Even as we approached St Malo, following a smooth passage entirely on the engine, we could still see Granville astern, twenty miles away.

By early evening we had reached the outer approaches into St Malo and the tricky pilotage began.  We found it hard to believe that such a successful port has developed surrounded by so many submerged rocks and other dangers before the era of Radar and GPS.  We followed our route down the Chenal de Grande Conchee, named after an island with a large round fort, looking just like a giant has upturned a sand filled bucket onto the beach.  The route takes you towards another fort on Le Petit Bey as you approach the walls of ‘Intra Muros’, the ancient walled and fortified city of St Malo and then a right turn takes you towards the more stylish resort of Dinard before turning into the harbour at St Servan.

St Servan proved to be a fine little town providing us with some excellent walks around a rocky peninsula to the Tour Solidor, which used to guard the Rance estuary and now houses the Cape Horn Mariners’ museum.

Contrary to the advice of the Shell Channel Pilot, which advocates the use of a taxi, it was just a twenty-minute walk across the harbours and lock gates into Ville Intra Muros, where we mixed with the ‘Cross Channel Traffic’ sampling the delights of Brittany.

Our favourite excursion, however, was the trip we took up the Rance estuary in the dinghy on a glorious sunny, but windy (F5), day.  On the return leg we moored to a buoy overlooked by the Tour Solidor and ate a picnic lunch beneath where some jolie jeunes femmes were sunbathing!  Chris was most impressed.  Bouncing back across the waves kicked up by the wind, the dinghy might almost have been flying at times, but at speed at least the ride was dry.