British expat and dinghy cruising guru Roger Barnes relishes the small-boat opportunities in France. In this new video, he takes us inside Les Rendez-Vous de L’Erdre, a celebration of sailing and swing music in Nantes, France. Sailing by chateaux or gently rowing with the river doing most of the work to get to the next swinging party, it seems like a rather cultured way to mess about in bats.
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William Moffitt says:
Small Boat Blues Cruise! Wish there was one…
Patrick Daniels says:
yes that is the sound of a seagull outboard!
Bruce Brown says:
Is there any way we can have this kind of fun in North America?
Nate Rooks says:
The Barefoot Raid in British Columbia or the Salish 100 in Washington State are amazing (relatively) new small cruises, but they don’t have the swing…
Chase Kenyon says:
I’d like to see one start in Lake Champlain and go up the canal to the Ste Lawrence Seaway and then down to the Thousand Islands Wooden and Antique Boat Festival.
It could be fronted by a trip up the Hudson (Cold Spring on Hudson or West Point at the Military Academy) then past Albany and up the canal to Lake Champlain. The other end could be extended down past Niagra Falls and further into the Great lakes and al the fabulous festivals on the lakes. It could then go down the Mississippi if desired.
Or one could start at the Thousand Islands Boat Museum and go down to Albany and then out the Erie Canal to the Great Lakes. Out the Ste Lawrence to the sea and down the coast past PEI and Main to Electric Boat where the submarines are built and my brother works, and then Mystic Sea and Boat Museum (like Disneyland for boaters) and the endless Boat Plans repository. and then down the CT coast and over to the festivities on Long Island. There are many festivals in Newport RI home of the US Naval College (President of which was my father’s mobilization billet (a 1 star admiral auto-upgrade to 2 stars.) Then you can go from LI to NJ and the inland waterway right down to Norfolk Virginia and the Boating Museum there with al the records of Chris-Craft and more. If you add the canals you can go just about anywhere by boat in the eastern half plus of the USA.
My bad back won’t let me sail anymore. So at this point, I hope for the finances to come in and get the Shepherd model 120s known as the “Firecracker”. You can sleep under the front deck or camp ashore. The Cracker is 24 feet long has twin Chrysler 413 Imperial Max Wedge V8s on V-drives. 24 ft 4800 lbs and 2 X 325 hp gets you there as slow or as fast as you wish. I’ll have to finally give in to the oil companies. (no more veggie oil-burning Mercedes S class diesels for this old salt).