Isle D'Yeu to Bourgenay

The morning we had planned to leave Isle d'Yeu was very grey indeed, nonetheless we set off in high hopes into the grey sea covered by a grey sky and tried our best to sail without too much success. We tried full sail, we tried main and gennaker, in the end we motor sailed again as the wind was less than 4 knots most of the time.

We had planned to go to a little place on the coast called Bourgenay, it was a relatively new marina built in 1984 along with a holiday development. We thought it would be a little quieter than Sables d' Olonne. Hour after hour we ploughed through the water heading towards the lighthouse at Les Barges

Eventually it came into view as the visibility cleared, we continued up the coast for another 7 miles until we located the fairway buoy marking the seaward end of the approach channel to the artificial marina.

Thus ended a very uneventful sail of about 33 miles.

The lady in the marina office had already found us a berth Lynne doing her usual sterling job on the radio. A very pleasant and helpful woman she gave us a map and other information and informed us that there would be a substantial reduction in rates as from tomorrow if we wished to stay longer than one night due to it being September the 1st, we could also claim a free night if we stayed for 5 nights.

We decided to look around.

We had not had any high hopes for Bougenay it really only being a convenient half way stop between Isle d'Yeu and La Rochelle, however once again the fates were about to surprise us......

In the morning I woke first and with our friendly ladies map in hand set off to find the boulangerie, as I climbed the hill behind the marina buildings I saw what looked like a vision of Disneyland.

Surmounted by what I now know to be the Star of the Sea, it is Notre Dame de Bougenaise, we think it's a convent. It is certainly a spectacular building. Later I returned with Lynne and we went inside the small chapel.

We also went below to the crypt, Lynne wasn't too sure about this, I am not sure what she was expecting to find, however once the lights were on it was really interesting, there was a tomb of the sister of St Louis.

As we walked about the grounds we were surprised to see a boating lake with small pedalos on it.

Also what appeared to be a model village, remenicent of Port Merion in Wales. We would explore this further later that day. We continued on into the small village and further towards the beach.

This turned out to be a spectacular sweep of sand and some impressive dunes.

We walked away from the road and car park discovering a small river where we sunbathed for an hour or two.

We walked back through the pine forests almost getting lost in the myriad of trails within.

As we got back to the village we decided to investigate the model village. We new there was a holiday development and golf course but we had no idea how extensive it was, it had shops and a piazza, a petting zoo and open air theatre as well as the aforementioned boating lake.

The fairytale castle in the background is the Notre Dame de Bourgenay we had visited earlier.

Bourgenay was turning out to be very surprising! We decided we had better stay another day and after eating we decided to take the cliff path west along the coast and watch the sunset, the cliff path although on top of a cliff obviously was mainly sand and the ubiquitous pine trees, really very lovely and as we walked along a perfect viewing platform to watch the sunset presented itself.