Benodet

The weather didn’t persuade us to do anything much and we would have stayed settled on the mooring all day if it weren’t for another yacht, whose mooring we were attached to, blowing its foghorn at us just as we were about to eat lunch!  It was still raining so we had to get coats and boots on to move to another mooring.  I suppose it wasn’t anyone’s fault but just a bit of a pain.  We opened a tin of Cassoulet for lunch.  If a French tourist ever buys sausages in beans in England (Heinz style) he or she will be very disappointed!

The following day we decided it was about time to go ashore to do some shopping and have a look around.  Benodet is a little tourist town with a huge emphasis on sailing and river trips.  Every few hours the Vedettes de L’Odet would head up the river with the commentary blaring out.  It reminded me a bit of Dartmouth although I thought not quite as pretty and without the castle!

We chatted briefly (and mostly about the ridiculously cold wet weather we’d been having) to a couple on an Achilles 9 metre from Burnham on Crouch.  They had wintered their boat in La Foret and were planning to take it down to northern Spain where they thought the weather might be a bit more consistent!

We had read that the river above Benodet becomes very attractive and since the showers there only last a pathetic 3 minutes (!) there was little tempting us to stay in the marina.  We consulted our pilot book and prepared to go.  We had seen a few other yachts heading up stream under sail and we were also very lucky with the wind.  It carried us almost silently up the Odet.

It was almost like another world.  In parts the steep wooded banks made you feel as if you could be in the Amazon and so few boats passed us that the tranquillity was overwhelming.  Then, you could turn a bend in the river and be greeted with the sight of a French Chateau with lawns sweeping down to the riverbank.  I almost expected to see women in bustled dresses whispering among themselves in some hidden corner of the garden!  We passed a spot with some mooring buoys, which looked rather pretty but we were keen to navigate as far as depths would allow.  At the point where the river really widened it also shallowed and we could finally see Quimper in the distance but we could go no further.

We contemplated anchoring and even went through the routine of testing out depths all around to check for swinging distance.  But the weather was turning a bit nasty on us and we decided to go back to the mooring buoys we had seen earlier.  We lunched there comfortably in the rain and spent the afternoon reading.  I was well into the first book of the Lord of the Rings and the mystical surroundings in which we found ourselves seemed more than appropriate.  When the tide turned in our favour we headed back towards the river mouth to pick up an overnight mooring so as to be closer to our exit in the morning.  We chose a lovely spot beneath the gardens of a chateau with one or two other yachts also settling for the night.