Sailing to St Tropez

Motoring up eastern side of Corsica   

With the forecast predicting very light northerly winds first thing on Saturday 15 July, building as the day progressed but to no more than about 15kts, we decided to leave Bastia early, once we had bought a fresh baguette. This plan meant that we would motor, rather than beat, our way up to Cap Corse, the northern tip of Corsica, and then we should have a good sailing wind for most of the rest of the journey to St Tropez. ‘Most of the rest of the journey’ because we were expecting a short period of calm in the middle of the night. But other than that, and the motor up to Cap Corse, we expected to sail all the way. Pretty good conditions it seemed given that Cap Corse has a reputation for being quite a tricky headland to get past, often with strong winds funnelled around the cape and confused seas built up over the shallows.

So we left at 0800 and trudged our way 20 miles north with calm winds as expected. The scenery was pleasant and we spotted a few small bays which might work as good stopover anchorages in a westerly wind or settled weather. Two firefighting seaplanes gave us a good flypast closely followed by a very fast motoryacht with a huge rooster tail wake which zipped past us. We were somewhat envious of his speed but not his fuel bill.

Pte di Agnello (top) and Îsle de la Giraglia   

We passed an old Genoese tower at Pte di Agnello and decided to go around the outside of the Îsle de la Giraglia to get a better angle on the light wind which was slowly building.

Sadly, it wasn’t for another couple of hours that there was enough to get sailing properly but the angle was good enough to just carry our MPS which made a big difference to our speed. [Ed: but putting the MPS up was a little too much of a strain for the author so he took to his bunk for an afternoon nap leaving me to enjoy the sailing!].

The wind, however, was not following the script and 2½ hours later it dropped off to below 5 knots and so we stowed the MPS and motorsailed (and then motored as the wind got lighter still) at low revs making 6 knots.

Dawn   

After dinner I turned in. Nicky had an hour of sailing but the rest of her watch was motoring until I came back on watch at 0130hrs. I got a couple of 1½ hour stints of sailing but essentially it was a gentle motorsail until 0600hrs. One of pleasures of sailing [Ed: motoring?] overnight is watching the sun come up and that was about the highlight of my watch.

Approaching St Tropez

From 0600hrs though, the wind did get up and to about to 11 knots too, which gave us a fabulous sail for the last 2 hours to get to the Golfe de St Tropez. In hindsight, the 152 mile, 24 hour passage would have worked out better if we had left 6 or 8 hours later but then you can only plan on the forecast.

Villas on the headland east of St Tropez   

Sailing into the Golfe de St Tropez we started to see the trappings of the rich and famous. The first headland we passed was covered in very large villas with extensive grounds….

Baie des Canebiers

…..and that was the theme all the way around the headland and into the Baie des Canebiers, our expected anchorage. We sent a message to Sean to see where he suggested we anchored to be most convenient for him and then took a short circuit around the bay. There were a lot of motoryachts anchored in the middle of the bay but we picked a good spot in the shallower water just to the east of St Tropez castle close to a lovely old wooden ketch.

We were just about to drop the anchor when a message came back from Sean. He suggested that we head right up to the top of the gulf to be closer to his base and further away from the really impressive wash generated by large, fast motoryachts hoofing out of the Gulf en route to some important lunchstop or another. That gave us the opportunity to motor past the really big yachts which were anchored just off St Tropez. It looked like a traffic jam of superyachts. I don’t think that we have seen so many in one place before and the scale of them was amazing; some were the size of cross channel ferries!

St Tropez   

Working our way past the superyachts we got a great view of St Tropez picked out in the morning light and then we got a great message form Sean. His text read, “Hot Tub on, rum in the fridge and washing machine ready for your laundry”, you can tell he’s a sailor!

BV anchored off Marines de Cogolin   

We eventually anchored at 0855 at the western end of the Golfe de St Tropez just off a beach close to the Marines de Cogolin. Sean’s base was very close by and within half an hour he and Caroline had come out to see us; a great excuse for an arrival beer whilst catching up on the news.

Golfe de St Tropez, France