The Tour du Bretagne is the 3^rd round of the French Elite Championship that I race in, and for me provided an incredible opportunity to familiarize myself with some of the places I’ll be racing in during La Solitaire.

As the event is double handed race with two co-skippers it made a great chance to team up with someone super experienced, with Sophie Faguet who is currently the Mixed European Offshore Championship Silver medalists, so that I could be proactive in my learning of the tricky tides rather than discovering this in hindsight.The format of the race is that we were racing from town to town and hold a stadium race in the town, the event goes on for 11 days. This year’s edition started in the Historic town of Saint Malo and finished in Quiberon.

The short stages meant the racing was intense and no space was afforded to anyone, as a result there were multiple false starts. Resulting in nervous waits to find out if you were guilty. Thankfully or by good judgement (I’ll let you decide) we went the entire 11 days without a penalty.

We got GBR38 ‘Just a Drop’ really moving at times with some fabulous starts throughout, guess the hard part of elite sport is staying at the front!

Figaro racing is like no other sport on earth, in any normal sport if after 24 hours of racing you were 10 minutes off first place you’d consider it a good race, not here 10 minutes off in 24 hours as we found ourselves on leg 4 put us in 20^th place.

One of the challenges of this race isn’t actually the racing, if you’re not French finding a place to stay on your arrival at each town can be quite fun.

Airbnb always seem to want to know the exact time we time we were going to arrive and our answer normally something along the line ‘I am very sorry but I do not know what time we will arrive as there is going to be light winds close to the town’.

‘Race food’ as we like to call it to make ourselves seem cool, is normally a mix of high energy food, boil in a bag meals and apples (as this is the only fruit that seems to be able to survive life onboard).

I often wondered what supermarket checkouts thought of us buying at times large quantities of perhaps France’s worst food, I imagine the lunch time conversation as “did you see the English guy? He came all the way to the home of good food and only goes for the horrible stuff”.

 After 11 days of racing, we were happy with how we had raced, maybe we had dreamt of being higher up but more importantly loads of lessons were learn for the next one!

 

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