There is a particular pleasure in eating ashore on someone else's plates and then rowing back to your own bed for nothing. The whole appeal of the anchored dinner is that the marina charges nothing, the restaurant gets your money instead, and you sleep where you like. France does this better than anywhere I have cruised, because so many of its best small restaurants sit on islands and in bays that are easiest to reach by boat. The trick is finding anchorages where you can drop securely, land a dinghy without a soaking, and walk to a decent table. Here are the ones that have fed us best.
Sainte-Marguerite, off Cannes: lunch at La Guerite
The Lerins are the obvious place to start, because the timing works perfectly for a meal ashore. Sainte-Marguerite lies 1,300 metres off the Cannes shore, and Cannes has laid an organised mooring zone where using the buoys between 0800 and 1800 is free. So you can pick up a mooring or anchor on the sand for nothing, dinghy ashore, and walk to La Guerite, the island's waterfront restaurant, for a long lunch with the boat in sight the whole time. Declare your arrival to the Moure Rouge harbour office on VHF channel 9.
The seabed off the island is sand and shoal, with patches under 2 metres at the north-west tip, so sound your way in and drop on a pale patch. By night the mooring becomes paid and reserved, but for a lunch ashore the Lerins are about as good as the Riviera gets. The full picture on the fees and the seasonal rules is in the guide to free and cheap anchorages near French ports.
Porquerolles village: anchor off, eat in the square
Porquerolles is the classic anchor-and-dine island. The village has a clutch of restaurants around the plane-tree square, a few minutes' walk up from the water, and you can anchor off the north shore and tender in. Plage d'Argent and the bays near the village give you sheltered sand in settled weather, sheltered from the mistral, and the dinghy run ashore is short and easy. For where to lie when the wind shifts, the survey of anchorages at Porquerolles and the Hyeres islands is the place to look.
One discipline that never changes here: drop on sand, never on the dark Posidonia seagrass, which is protected and fines yachts over 24 metres up to 150,000 euros for damaging it. Beyond the law, an anchor set in clean sand holds while you are away from the boat, which is exactly when you want it to. The reasoning is in the Posidonia anchoring ban in France.
Cassis and the calanques: a port at the head of the inlet
Port-Miou, the first calanque east of Cassis, is the only one with permanent moorings, holding some 550 boats under 20 metres, and it sits within easy walking distance of the restaurants of Cassis itself. Anchoring in the Calanques National Park is restricted to marked zones and sometimes needs the capitainerie's permission, so this is one where you take a mooring or a berth rather than dropping freely. But once you are secured, Cassis is a proper fishing port with a quayside full of places serving the local sea urchins and the Cassis white wine, and the walk in from Port-Miou is part of the evening.
Brittany: island bistros worth the row
The Atlantic side trades warm water for character, and Brittany's islands hide some of the best eating in France. Houat is a favourite of ours: the great arc of Treac'h er Goured beach, 2.2 kilometres of fine sand, gives a sheltered anchorage in westerlies, and the walk over the dunes to the village leads to a handful of restaurants serving the day's catch from the brightly painted fishing boats in Port-Saint-Gildas. It is a proper expedition, a walk rather than a stroll, which somehow makes the meal taste better.
Belle-Ile's Sauzon, with its grocery, restaurants and bars, is a ten-minute bike or thirty-five-minute walk from the wild-coast anchorage at Ster-Vraz, a natural harbour with a sandy bottom well sheltered from south, east and north-east winds. The catch on the Atlantic is always the tide: with spring ranges of 6 to 10 metres, a dinghy left on the beach at high water can be high and dry or floating off by the time pudding arrives. We drag the tender well up and write the next low water on the back of a hand before we sit down. The wider habit of eating ashore at harbour restaurants in France is worth a read if this is the kind of cruising you want to build a trip around.
Saint-Honorat: dinner with the monks' wine
A different sort of meal awaits on Saint-Honorat, the second Lerins island, 1.6 kilometres off Cannes. The Cistercian community here has worked an 8-hectare vineyard since 1869, turning out around 35,000 bottles a year plus a celebrated liqueur, and the island restaurant, La Tonnelle, serves lunch with that wine looking out over the water. Anchoring zones are marked around the island to protect the seabed, so you drop in the permitted areas, dinghy ashore through the pines, and eat where the only soundtrack is the cicadas. It is the antidote to the Riviera's noise, and an easy pairing with a morning anchored off Sainte-Marguerite next door. Buy a bottle to take back aboard, because you will not find it in many shops.
Bendor and Embiez: islands of restaurants
Off Bandol and Six-Fours in the Var sit two curiosities, the Paul Ricard islands, both bought by the pastis magnate in the 1950s and run as little restaurant-and-hotel worlds. Bendor, just 7 hectares, sits a seven-minute ferry hop off Bandol and has five restaurants on it, with cuisine overseen by a single chef across both islands. Its harbour is tiny, billed as the smallest in the Mediterranean at 2,800 square metres and 2 metres deep, so you anchor off in settled weather and tender in. Embiez, much larger at 95 hectares with pine woods, vineyards and coves, is the better cruising stop, with anchorages around its shores and restaurants ashore. Both are fair-weather, exposed places, so you watch the forecast, but on a calm evening they make an unusual dinner: you eat on a private island and sleep on your own boat in the bay.
How to anchor for a meal ashore
Anchoring to leave the boat is a higher bar than anchoring to sleep aboard, because you will be a few hundred metres away and possibly slightly merry. My rules:
- Set the anchor harder than usual and pay out generous scope, then dive it or feel it before you leave.
- Pick a bay sheltered from the wind that is forecast to build, not the one that is calm now. The Med sea breeze can reach Force 5 or 6 by late afternoon and turn a flat lunch anchorage into a slop while you are at the table.
- Take a handheld VHF and your phone, and note the restaurant's number, so you can be reached if a neighbour spots you dragging.
- Land the dinghy where you can get it off again at the state of tide you will return at. On the Atlantic this is not optional.
Worth the row
The anchored dinner is one of the genuine luxuries of cruising France: you pay a fishing-village restaurant for a plate of what came off the boats that morning, and you sleep for free in a bay you chose. Sainte-Marguerite for a Riviera lunch, Porquerolles for a village dinner, Houat or Sauzon for the Atlantic version. Anchor well, watch the wind and the tide, and the only bill is the one you wanted to pay.
