Brest 2008

 

dianna and i got back from Brest at 3am on wednesday (a week ago) after a little over 24 hours of almost nonstop traditional boat overload. and man do the french know how to throw a party. much of this piece is poached from an email i sent to two good wooden boat friends back in bc (hence the numerous pilot cutter references).

i’ll try and recount the two days from the top… i’ll probably ramble, but it’s wooden boat ramble so that’s ok… we picked up the rental car (a tiny black diesel mercedes) tuesday morning and began the 630 km of nonstop driving (all by dianna!) getting us into the festival about 6pm. The site is friggin huge, like the  size of the expo 86 site in vancouver, however, unlike expo 86 there was a beer stall every 100 metres.

That first night we checked out half of the site, tons of shoreside exhibits, the norwegian, croatian & Galicia villages and managed to locate Marian (one of the original Bristol Channel pilot cutters),  Marie Fernand (a newly refurbished & just re-launched French pilot cutter) which had a major party going on aboard, and what we thought might be a couple Luke Powell pilot cutters (which are new traditionally built Scillian pilot cutters). After a a really good supper of “breton” -whole wheat- crepes stuffed with smoked salmon and big bottle of breton cider, we checked out the “promenade de nuit” which was really good. About 50 plus boats, ranging from fife’s moonbeam & La Recouverance (both big vessels) to tiny Madegascarian sprit rigged dugouts did a sail past parade accompanied by a booming soundtrack (we have a new appreciation for the finer details of the Breton bag pipe accompanied by a drum machine) a light show, fireworks and numerous out of date flares. It was really cool to see all those boats sailing in close quarters at night with music and light and Thousands of people watching it!

Next morning after a couple shots of espresso we were back at it. First we checked out the other half of the site which contained a bunch of navy crap we skipped over to explore the vietnam and madagascar villages. The Vietnam village had a really cool traditional marionette show, on water. with “swimming” water squirting dragons and so on. pretty cool.

After that we conned our way onto the “pleasure boat” section of floats, (b/c the event is so huge only those with special passes can get onto boats, or even the floats the boats are tied up to) so we could get a closer look at Eve and Annabel J (more pilot cutters) which were there as well as about easily 300 other boats of interest in that section, like Moonbeam. At this time all but 1 of my 4 sets of batteries died on me, and last set was flashing the low battery signal, which was a real shame because it was then that we got aboard Agnes and had a nice chat with Luke Powell. 

oh, did i just drop a name, yup, damn straight! 

i tell you that half hour friggin made the show for me. up until then it had been great but a little disappointing in that it was hard to get a good look a specific boats or even talk to the crews. Also the crowds were nuts, and because the show was so damn huge you tended to end up wondering around in a trance certain you were missing something amazing. Anyway, it was really great to meet Luke Powell and get a good look at least one boat out of the 2000 there. Agnes is Luke’s home now; he bought it back off the guy who he built it for. It was in a bit of a state (total mess) as he and another guy were ripping out old electrics and trying to solve a problem involving old electronic gear while nursing hangovers. 

He was very hospitable though and answered all my pesky questions. Inside the boat there was an old black and white photo of a wrecked cutter on the beach somewhere. I asked Luke about it and he brightened right up. It was the original boat that Agnes is a replica of, the photo was taken over a 100 years ago on the isle of Scilly by a member of a family that has been taking photographs their for 5 generations. Luke was able to use it to get scantling details, however, in itself it is a stunning photo.

Before my batteries completely died i managed to get a few shots of Agnes. Luke had confirmed that besides the other 3 of his boats at the show the only other English pilot cutter there were Marian and the Steel Annabel J, most of which were out sailing at that time. So we briefly checked out his other boat rafted up “Hesper”, grabbed a last glass of breton beer to drink while we watched from a hilltop the over 300 (i counted) boats out sailing off Brest.

There was lots of other crazy & cool stuff we saw: some really good bands, an amazing all-female acapela Galacian chorus, a 100 foot long mechanical dinosaur with a trapeze artist hanging from its neck performing above the crowds, great marine art, potatoes in drawer, the leather work on all of moonbeams gear, the norwegian small boats… even a massive modern racing trimaran was kinda cool, to say nothing of the countless french traditional boats. It was almost 7 pm by the time we finished our beer and we were starving but also had to have the car back in paris by 10 the next morning, so we grabbed a bottle of rose (mostly mine) and a picnic dinner, drove out to a beach on the coast for supper and then began the long drive back.

phew!

here endeth the longest blog entry i will ever write (unless we go to Dournenez next year)