Anchoring as only Frenchmen dare

Sunset on 17 May, whilst we were anchored in Addaya, was delightful. There was barely a breath of wind and, despite the number of villas and the marina, this relatively remote cala is amazingly quiet. We listened to woodland birds calling out and the quiet lapping of water from the shore.

Suddenly the peace was disturbed as a French yacht motored into the anchorage. En passant they tossed out an anchor whilst adjacent to a yacht secured to a mooring buoy. As all of the action was on the foredeck, the gentlemen on the helm moved forward to watch his colleague throw out an extra few handfuls of chain and warp whilst the helmless yacht turned and missed the moored yacht by inches. Having successfully snagged the mooring buoy’s sinker, the yacht came to a halt barely a few feet behind the moored yacht (French yacht on the left in the picture above).

With such an unusual arrival we were not surprised to see the 2 gentlemen immediately set to pumping up their dinghy. We assumed that they were gong to use the dinghy to get a better angle to retrieve the anchor before moving location for the night. But then we were thinking like Brits – the priority, we discovered, was actually to abandon the yacht and take the dinghy ashore for a nice long dinner in the restaurant!

Now if we had done that then the wind, or any slight current would have turned, and spun our yacht so that it bumped into the moored yacht. And sure enough, a couple of hours later the yachts did turn about. We could see how the Frenchmen had left the fenders out on the port side of their yacht which would not touch the moored yacht but had lifted the fenders onboard on the starboard side; such confidence that there would be no bumping whilst they ate dinner.

Convinced that there was likely to be an unfortunate meeting of the 2 yachts, we were pleased that we still had our dinghy out and put the kettle on for another coffee whilst the yachts settled. Surely the yacht at anchor would swing more than the one moored and the 2 would potentially collide. We stood by ready to row across but amazingly the yachts settled again with minimal separation. They say “the luck of the Irish” but our money is on “the luck of the anchoring Frenchman”!

Addaya, Menorca, Spain