Carnet de Voyage: a Day in Douarnenez

Travel notes from the real France. Carnet de Voyage is a weekly personal travel story in France sent in by readers. If you’d like to write a story for Carnet de Voyage, head here for details on how to submit.

This is a brief experience from a sailing race in France called the Tour de Bretagne à la Voile a stage race which started in Saint-Malo and finished in Quiberon. It’s the 4th round of the French Elite Offshore Sailing Championship. Each team is made up of two sailors who sail onboard 10-metre-long sailing boats. I teamed up with Normande Sophie Faguet. This extract comes from the 24-hour stopover at the end of the étape from Saint-Quay to Douarnenez.

After 24 hours of racing around “the corner of Brittany”, against the wind and current, is an étape, that I will forever remember. We’d been leading the opening 18 hours. Despite the stage being 132 miles, the longest of the tour, the intensity is comparable to that of the shortest of the stage (30 miles). The stage was a game of who dares wins, with regards to the proximity of the shoreline to reduce the distance to the finish line. Sophie said after a strong start “you are ok with being the first person in the rocks?”. Referring to the fact that we were about to slalom around Brittany’s rocky shoreline.   

We had 30 miles to go through the rainy, foggy morning, leaving the extreme tidal flow of le Chenal du Four into the Bay of Douarnenez at that moment to have its own microclimate surrounded by sunshine. Crossing the finish line, emotions were mixed. Happy to have been in the match with the big names but a little disappointed as the final result didn’t reflect this.

Douarnenez, one of many quaint towns on the Breton coast, sits at the mouth of the Pouldavid River. The sight of the bridge over the river with my tired eyes and after 24 hours of racing left a significant impression on me – almost as much as if it were San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. Close to the marina is a host of places to eat. We chose the Café de la Pointe for a late-breakfast-early-lunch-post-race-I’ll-eat-anything. I’m not sure if this meal has a name but we tucked into steak frites. I find ordering steak in France funny because once I had learned how I like my steak to be cooked, I never bothered to learn the other options, because well, what use would it be to me?  

As we ate, there was a strange mix of comings and goings from the race, each team with their own story of joy and frustration, sharing tales of misfortune and brilliance. 

Walking from the marina to our room for the night, I was struck by how charming this little town was. I made a promise to myself that one day I would come back here when I wasn’t racing to really enjoy it. Douarnenez’s narrow cobbled streets seem like a throwback to a bygone era where life is lived at a slower pace. The queue at the boulangerie offers an opportunity to make new friends rather than an inconvenience in an otherwise busy day.

As a Brit predominantly racing against the French, most of the people that I was racing against seemed to take each stopover as a chance to educate me on French culture, with Douarnenez being a lesson in the Kouign-amann. The Kouign-amann which literally translates to “butter cake”, has a crisp caramelised initial taste yet with soft flaky layers of pastry in the middle. High in calories? Yes! Healthy? Probably not. However, after 24 hours of racing some of which we’d been fighting for the win, we told ourselves that this was “bien mérité”, well deserved.  

I was struck by how accommodating (on land at least) racing sailors in France are, compared with the UK. That evening, we’d organised with the rest of the Région Normandie team (Sophie being from Normandy) – Alexis and Guillaume – to have dinner together. Maybe because none of us are Breton, we felt the need to band together for self-defence. In the UK, you wouldn’t be seen alive having dinner with another team during a race! We’d spent much of the first 12 hours of the étape a few metres from each other, but now, and maybe controversially, I was being introduced to Norman cuisine, which seems to revolve around Calvados and grilled Camembert.

The following day, racing started early, but that didn’t stop the seemingly compulsory trip to the boulangerie for breakfast, lunch and a coffee. Our boulangerie of choice on that sunny July morning was La Breizh Pause. On our way to the marina, we passed an open-air boat building chantier which I mentally added to my list of sights to return to. 

Our brief pause in this jolie ville to enjoy life’s luxuries had come to an end, and we were off again, racing a 65-mile parcours to the walled town of Concarneau. 

Read our other Carnet de Voyage entries here.

David Paul is a British sailor who has raced the best part of three seasons in French Elite Offshore Championship. He would like to race a few more seasons in France with the ultimate dream of one day competing the Vendée Globe. He started writing about this big French adventure four years ago for his partner and has found writing as much fun as the sailing. He documents his adventures at sea on his website www.davidpaulsailing.com/davidsdiary.