Transform a Sea Angler into a riverboat to the French coast and canals
Designed to carry fishing gear for fishing trips, Mitch, our Mitchell 31 MkII Sea Angler is necessarily a very.
There is an open cockpit with the engine box in its center, a wheelhouse and a small front cab.
We had bought Mitch in 1999 and spent many satisfied days taking our children, their friends, cousins and beach toys around Poole Harbour, venturing into the Solent.
The children grew up and Mitch a miserable sight in the garden.
In 2017, my wife Sally and I were thinking about buying a sailboat, with the concept of an Atlantic circuit.
We looked at several yachts, but couldn’t buy another boat while Mitch was so embarrassingly neglected, with plants growing in the holds.
We intended to leave it blank in a position for a quick sale.
Years of exploring trenches at Mitch made the draft of the sailboats we had inspected excessive, and after two hours of a strangely successful cleanup,
I had a sudden thought: “Mitch’s draft is thin, and we’ll probably pass through the Canal du Midi. “
I had never done river sailing and didn’t know much about the Canal du Midi, which led to the Mediterranean and was too shallow for many fixed-keel yachts.
We discussed our options. We can sell Mitch “as is” for a small fee, buy a sailboat and, in a few years, cross our Atlantic circuit.
It would be a leap into the dark, as we didn’t have much recent experience in cruising or sailing.
Alternatively, it seemed that Mitch’s refit wasn’t: we had already bought a new engine and maybe deserved to use the boat we already had to leave that year.
Plans may evolve based on our limited vacation allowance and Mitch capabilities.
We took advantage of Mitch’s shallow draft and crossed the French canals into the Mediterranean, but we knew the redesign would require a lot of paint and a good amount of money.
Mitch wasn’t designed for long-haul cruises: there were few hotels and no amenities, not even a water tank.
The useless little rudder at low speeds and reverse.
Our cruise would be limited to about two weeks at a time. Can we modify Mitch to live on board?
We wrote a spreadsheet detailing the required paints and cost, a scary list, but positive in the end.
That was in May 2017, and 3 months of exhaustion followed. Working on your boat at home means there isn’t and all your equipment is at hand.
However, it is very easy to try too hard, and we did it brilliantly.
We got rid of all rotten wood cabin foot supports and manufactured a new design from pressure-treated wood.
We manufacture new cab panels, the Iveco N67 engine and ZF gearbox, water tanks, domestic water pumps, stove, water heater, 70-litre reserve fuel tank, sewage system, Raymarine electronics and autopilot and even a cabin shower.
There have been setbacks.
Sally fell into the holds when the cabin boards were raised, damaging her ankle, and I short-circuited a battery with a screwdriver, burning my hand when I tried to retrieve it and causing a satisfied fire in the wheelhouse.
By August 2017, the ship was almost finished and an expert declared it satisfactory.
When the shipping company arrived to compare the work, it was seen that the trees surrounding the boat and on the way to space had grown considerably, and the night before the crane arrived, I performed radical surgery on a rented cherry tree. .
Mitch’s Portland pitch wasn’t a resounding success.
When the boat floated, I signaled to the motive force of the elevator and drove the engine control forward, after which the boat sank intelligently.
With a raging wind, we tried to dock the boat in the marina, but it was noticeable that there was a leak, and we placed it at the height of the flange of the exhaust outlet of the engine fixed on the waterline.
Demoralized, we looked for Mitch to take over again and get back to work.
We replaced the (new) silencer with a liftable edition and drilled a gap for a new aft mirror above the waterline.
Sally’s bearings were in demand again.
The timing of the launch, in mid-August 2017, was and we took Mitch for a stroll around Portland Harbor to get the autopilot going.
I was concerned because the engine did not go above 1,400 rpm.
It had several theories, such as fuel flow, inadequate spicy tension, excessive exhaust tension and overload, because the top speed of the Iveco engine was 2,800 rpm, instead of the 2,600 rpm of the old Ford Sabre.
I checked the fuel system, put strain gauges on the intake manifold and exhaust, and followed the curves of the propeller and engine, but saw nothing wrong.
The last detail was the cabin canopy, important as we intended to live in the cabin rather than in the small front cabin.
We arrived late and exhausted on the eve of our departure.
The general pressures of the works and the delay of the season meant that we had to endure.
In mid-August 2017, after an hour of sleep, we returned early to Portland and set off.
There was little wind, but a sea left by recent strong winds made the boat’s movement very lively as we headed towards Guernsey.
As the hours passed, I learned that I had made a serious error in judgment because I had a day off.
Sally had succumbed to dizziness and exhaustion, we left Portland Bill.
I only supported through the excitement of being at sea in Mitch. Now I worried that I wouldn’t have the power to deal with an emergency.
Fortunately, Raymarine’s new autopilot and chartplotter ran smoothly and the engine ran at 1,200 rpm, giving about 8 knots.
We crossed the shipping routes, sighted Les Casquets, then Alderney and, despite everything, Guernsey, and moored in front of Beaucette Marina at 15:00.
The anchorage moved a little, but Sally temporarily recovered.
We made dinner with our new stove and slept soundly with our new cabin blanket.
Beaucette Marina is unique, a former granite quarry that was connected to the sea in the 1960s via Royal Engineers, who used explosives to dig a channel into the rock.
We woke up early, amazed to have taken the Mitch across the Channel and spent an afternoon on board, all of which we had worked on and worked on as we hoped.
Our planned destination Roscoff in western Brittany, and we had planned the trip the night before.
This was for our practice invariable.
We plot the planned direction and something on paper maps before entering anything into the plotter.
It is true that some of our maps are very outdated, in black and white editions of the Admiralty inherited from my father, but I think they provide a useful revision of the route.
Sally was given quite a bit more when we crossed the Little Russell.
The Dover Rocks in view as the engine lurched and then stalled.
We controlled the deployment of the Tohatsu outboard motor and were pleased when it gave us around 3. 5 knots, fast enough for the autopilot to work.
The nearest port Lézardrieux, so we changed course towards it. The problem, of course, is water in fuel.
I didn’t have transparent ideas, so it took me longer than it has been to realize.
At the end we enter the Trieux estuary with the main locomotive, and go up the river to the marina of Lézardrieux.
We left the boat on a pontoon and went by taxi to Roscoff’s ferry.
My employer arranged a rental car in Plymouth, and we drove home, I had to get up early to make a stopover at the site in Nottingham.
Rarely have I felt as disoriented as that day. This turned out to be a not unusual fact: on the boat we delight so much, we have a “sensory overload” and returning to the everyday global is disturbing.
We return to Lézardrieux, a town on the river on the tide of the Trieux, via ferry and car a few weeks later, intending to take the boat to Roscoff for the winter.
We took the boat downstream and anchored near the mouth, in a position for an early start, however, when we left the next morning, we were still concerned about the water in the fuel tank and the inability of the engine to run at over 1400 rpm.
We go up the river to the city and secure a winter position in the courtyard. In November 2017 we returned to Lézardrieux.
After further tracking the engine force relative to the propeller curve, I came to the conclusion that the fuel injection pump must have been adjusted incorrectly.
I conscientiously turned the engine so that piston No1 was in the most sensitive medium of the stroke stroke, and got rid of the injection pump, disconnecting the starter motor and leaving the engine in that position.
We got rid of the propeller to restore it and replaced the uninterruptible bearing on the drive shaft.
Removing the nut from the propeller shaft was difficult, and we had to explore the backyard to locate a box segment to pry on the wrench.
We emptied the fuel tank and cleaned it thoroughly, an unsightly task as it contained a large amount of emulsified fuel. I had run out of water when I cleaned the tank while the boat was still in our backyard.
It was the end of the first season of Mitch’s travels. We had saved her from abandonment and taken her across the Channel.
Back in northern Brittany the following year, our target was still the Mediterranean, but there were 400 miles of salt water between the Mitch quay and the western terminus of the Garonne Canal at Castets in Dorthe.
We intended to use 4 weeks off, in increments, to explore Brittany before a winter stop off the coast of Biscay.
We joined Mitch in Lezardrieux in early May 2018, with a slight concern.
Although we thought we had removed all the water from the fuel tank, Mitch’s engine refused to run at more than 1400 rpm and I hoped that my diagnosis of the problem (a poorly calibrated fuel injection pump) would be correct.
We recalibrate the injection pump, timing it carefully.
To our delight, when we went down the river after launching the boat, the engine ran freely, pushing the boat to 16 knots.
The first leg of the adventure is not propitious.
Starting from a night anchorage near the end of the Trieux estuary in a rather steep northwest, the contents of the front cabin shelves were pushed aside with a crash, and the rest was bumpy.
I was alone in the wheelhouse on Roscoff’s technique, and as the prospect of a night in a marina did not seem attractive to me, I looked for a remote anchorage up the canal to the inland port of Morlaix.
I wondered about the poverty of the marks and the narrowness and intensity of the canal leading to this once-vital port, when Sally entered the wheelhouse, she looked at the overly enlarged map plotter and pointed out that we were on the Penze River, several miles to the west. of Morlaix.
This was a fortuitous mistake, as we discovered a quiet and sheltered anchorage, the night in the cabin tent was very cold.
The next day we leave the boat at the marina of Roscoff, and we go by taxi, bus and exercise to pick up the car in Lézardrieux.
The exercise ventures along the meanders of the Trieux to Paimpol a delight.
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At the end of May we returned to Roscoff leaving the car in a parking lot of the marina. Roscoff (Rosco in Breton) was a former base for smugglers, and later the “Onion Johnnies” who cycled through the south of England, selling onions.
In the 1970s, Breton farmers pressured the French to build a deep-water port at Roscoff.
As no shipping company moved between Roscoff and Plymouth, the farmers created their own and Brittany Ferries was born.
After the night in the Penze, we continue west.
The Libenter reef near Aber Wrac’h presented us with our first view of the Atlantic waves crashing on the unforgiving rocks of Brittany.
The Wrac’h is wooded and pleasant, and we moor for the night in a stern, or corpse, anchorage.
The Canal of the Four placid as Mitch crossed it at a favorable tide.
Ahead of our time for an expanding water passage of the Raz de Sein, we crossed the Iroise in slow motion, Trevennec soon fog.
Although there is surfing at the base of La Vielle, the Raz is in a good mood.
The prohibition of La Vielle the scene of tragedy in the 1920s, when many lives were lost trying to save two lighthouse keepers.
The following days, we drove along the coast, taking advantage of Mitch’s shallow draft to locate a remote anchorage upstream of the Odet River.
We visited the Glenan Islands one morning and marveled at the sun rising, revealing a seascape replete with granite, white sand, and bright blue skies.
In the huge marina of La Forêt-Fouesnant, where we intended to leave the boat on the way home, we made the biggest mistake we have made so far.
Encouraged by the splendid week, we set out to clean the shipment and throw away the food scraps to prepare for a festive meal in the restaurant.
Such was our madness: it was Monday and we were in Brittany. We visited the tightly enclosed restaurants of the marina and then, with morale at its lowest point, in the city.
Discouraged, we went back to the boat and did our thing with a box of peas and fried cakes made with flour and water.
After a bloodless and depressing night, we went by taxi to a disturbingly quiet station in Quimper, where we were told that a strike meant there were no TGV trains running.
We took a commuter bus to Brest, then a local exercise and a bus to Roscoff and the ferry.
At the end of June, we returned to the ship after a fast plane and train, followed by a long search for taxis at Quimper station.
After a night in Glénans, now even busier, we headed inland to the island of Groix, an island that was once captured by the English, who failed to interest the French in paying a ransom.
Our destination, Etel, is via a disreputable mobile bar and was once home to a fleet of tuna sailing boats, guided above the bar through a traffic light station that now warns sailors via VHF.
Under a bright sun, we enter the estuary in opposition to a strong high tide and continue to the bridge, enjoying the stark contrast of clear blue water and yellow sand, before mooring on a pontoon outside the marina.
Mitch’s team sleeps in the cabin tent, and early in the morning we felt isolated from the outdoor world, when the youth of Etel took advantage of the low tide to climb around the inner design of the marina’s concrete wall to pick up anything that worried torches and conversations aloud inches from our bunk beds.
After a brief prevention on the island of Houat, we passed through the Teignose Pass, less difficult than Hawke’s squadron, which, in November 1759, pursued the French fleet to Quiberon Bay, defeated it and sabotaged French plans to invade England.
We enter Morbihan, crossing this captivating landlocked bay to the Auray tide river, where we anchor in shallow water off the port of Bono.
The river, with its deserted castle, looked wonderful under the scorching sun.
We had booked an anchorage in Foleux sur los angeles Vilos angelesine – once a tidal estuary, which has been remodeled in enormous enthusiasm the angeleske through the structure of a dam in Arzal, with constant water grades in the angelesnd.
It’s our first stop at a lock, and it’s better to put a veil on it, but the Vilaine is beautiful.
In the Captaincy, Mitch tied himself to a dead frame in the river. We did a slow exercise to La Rochelle and went home.
Our last of 2018 was a soft cruise in Morbihan and Vilaine.
The momentary passage of the Arzal lock much less difficult than the first, our only difficulty when we put the boat sideways in the immediate ebb at Penerf, almost trapping Sally’s arm between the mooring and the boat.
We sailed down the Vilaine to Redon and met our son, Martin, at the station.
We rented an ordinary farmhouse belonging to the head gardener of Nantes, full of giant cacti and exotic plants, then enjoyed a ferry from St Malo, skirting the Cotentin peninsula in good weather.
In March 2019, we had a grim layover at the shipyard. We stayed in a two star hotel in an advertising park in Redon and it was rainy and bloodless while we did a preventative cleaning of the fuel tank.
The propeller had gone through a grounding in the Vilaine estuary, so we brought it back to England for overhaul.
When we returned to Foleux in April, Sally fought the expansion with the pressure washer.
Mitch showed up on April 29 and we anchored overnight near the mouth of the Vilaine before a tricky 50-mile passage to Port Joinville on the Ile d’Yeu.
It was dizzy, so in order to reduce the time, we increased the speed of our old 8 knots to thirteen knots, and the boat became more comfortable.
The picturesque Ile d’Yeu is a holiday destination, with controlled development.
On rental bikes, we rode to the southern tip of the island, knowing that we had left Brittany and were now in Vfinishée.
We bought ridiculously expensive fuel (by 2019 standards) and, after diagnosing a problem with the autopilot (without realizing it, I turned off the hydraulic pump), we set off at a constant 12 knots for a vacation, so I won’t forget it.
Southeast through a quiet, blue Bay of Biscay, past Les Sables d’Olonne, where huge racing yachts were trained, before flowing into the Pertuis Breton, with the starboard near Ile de Ré and the bridge of Ré growing higher and higher until they were down, in front of an oil tanker unloading at La Pallice and crossing the Basque roads, so evocative of naval history, towards the island of Oléron and St Denis, notable for its many cheerful fishermen.
As St Denis Marina is tide, we left early the next morning and picked up an open-air anchorage to wait for favourable tide situations to enter the Gironde.
I have wonderful respect for the Gironde front, because once on a 20,000-ton BP tanker it had to wait two days offshore for the weather to moderate before attempting the crossing.
We went north around the island of Oléron, through Pertuis d’Antioche, than the shallow Pertuis Maumasson at the southern end.
The 30-mile adventure to the south went smoothly, despite the strong waves.
The Cordouan lighthouse emerged from the fog and we veered to port on the buoy of the Grande Passe de l’Ouest canal.
In the channel, the swell rises alarmingly, with the boat surfing them, while I look for breakers in the back.
We intended to prevent in Royan, but Mitch did so well that we continued to the Gironde, passed our first wine castle, to the town of Paulliac.
The marina here is swept through the existing Gironde, and we climb a buoy to the post, anxiously watching the maneuvers of a river cruise ship that sends docking at the dock.
The next morning we visit the Tourist Office, then enjoy a wine tasting at La Rose Paulliac and a glorious walk through the vineyards of Château Rothschild.
We leave at 07:00 on May 2, with water like liquid powder running down the quay, and take an anchorage to wait for the optimum tide in the Gironde.
We left upstream at 11:00, although the existing ones directed us all day. Crossing the city of Bordeaux by boat was a wonderful experience, although the many arches of the Pont St Pierre gave us moments of anguish, Mitch had to call by force. reserves to raise the state wave below.
The Garonne, with its fast, muddy and amazing towns, villages and castles, was truly beautiful, and as we docked on the pontoon waiting at Castets in Dorth, I felt that the last 8 hours were the most productive I had ever spent. on a boat.
When we disembark, we identify the lock. It was a non-violent place, our sleep was disturbed by otters playing on the pontoon and jumping into the river.
In the morning, Mitch slowed down on the fairway, a road bridge built across the Eiffel, waiting for a green light to enter the lock.
We were about to leave the tides and enter new water for the first time.
We had enjoyed our adventures so far and couldn’t wait any longer. It would be 3 years before Mitch returned to England.
Southern Brittany and western France are a perfect place to sail, but making travel plans is for first-time visitors. Beware of the tides!
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