There is a moment, about halfway across from Granville, when the low grey smudge on the horizon resolves into a scatter of pink granite, white sand and a single squat lighthouse, and you understand why people keep coming back to Chausey. The novelist Jean-Francois Deniau called the Sound the most beautiful anchorage in the world after Bora Bora, and on a calm evening with the tide ebbing out across the sandbanks it is hard to argue. The crossing itself is short. The catch is that everything about it is governed by the largest tides in Europe.
A nine-mile passage that feels longer
Chausey lies roughly nine nautical miles off Granville, about seventeen kilometres, which the tourist ferries cover in fifty minutes to an hour. Under sail at five or six knots you are looking at an hour and a half to two hours in still water, but you will rarely have still water. The Bay of Mont Saint-Michel breathes through a tidal range of up to fourteen metres on the biggest coefficients, among the greatest on the planet, and that volume of water moving in and out generates streams that run hard across your track.
So the crossing is less about distance and more about vectors. Work out the set and drift for your departure time, lay off for it, and check your course made good against the GPS rather than trusting the heading. Get it wrong and you can find yourself a mile downtide of where you meant to be, staring at a different gap in the rocks from the one you planned to use.
Timing the tide for the crossing
I plan a Chausey trip around two tides, not one. The first decides when I can get out of Granville, because the marina sits behind a sill and a gate that only open for a few hours either side of high water. The piece on Granville as the gateway to Chausey covers the gate timing in detail, and it is worth reading before you commit to a date, because the gate, not the weather, is usually what dictates your departure.
The second tide decides when I want to arrive. The Sound and the approaches to Chausey are thick with drying rocks, the kind that make a chart look like a child has flicked ink at it. At low water on a big coefficient something like 365 islets dry out, and only around 50 stay above water at high tide. You want to come in with reasonable rise so the dangers are covered and the marks are clear, but not so much water that you cannot read where the channel runs. I aim for the second half of the flood, a couple of hours before local high water, which gives me depth, a fair stream into the Sound, and time to get settled before the tide turns.
The approach and the Sound
The main anchorage is the Sound, the stretch of water between the Grande Ile and the chain of islets to its east, sheltered from the south-west by the bulk of the main island. There is a field of visitor mooring buoys here, laid in pairs, with room for something like 80 boats rafted up two to a buoy in season. They go quickly on a fine August weekend, so have a fall-back plan to anchor clear of the moorings if they are all taken.
Coming in, follow the marked approach rather than cutting corners. The rocks here do not forgive optimism, and the stream through the gaps can run several knots even inside the archipelago. Once you are on a buoy, watch how the boat lies: the tide swings you hard through 180 degrees as it turns, and you want to be sure you will not range up against a neighbour or sit over a drying patch when the water goes. On the bigger coefficients the bottom of the tide leaves boats sitting in a shrinking pool of channel between banks that were open water two hours earlier, which is part of the strange magic of the place but also a reason to check your swinging room carefully.
Going ashore on the main island
The Grande Ile is the only inhabited island, home to a handful of permanent residents, a hotel, a couple of restaurants and a small chapel, with a lighthouse at the southern end and a ruined fort at the north. There are no cars. You land by dinghy at the slip near the village, and you can walk the whole island in a couple of hours, across white-sand beaches and through gorse and granite that glow in the evening light. The fishermen still work the waters for lobster and the famous Chausey clams, and the seafood ashore is as fresh as it gets.
Take a torch for the walk back to the dinghy if you stay for dinner, mind your tender against the falling tide, and do not leave it where six metres of ebb will strand it up a beach.
Weather and when to go
Chausey is an open anchorage, and while the Sound shelters you well from the south-west and west, it is exposed from the north-east through east. I treat it as a settled-weather destination and would not sit there with a fresh onshore forecast. Watch the wind direction as carefully as the tide, and keep an escape plan in mind: Granville is your bolt-hole, but only when its gate is open, so a blow that arrives at low water can leave you committed to staying put.
The best of it is late spring through early autumn, when the days are long and the chances of a settled high are best. Pick a gentle coefficient for your first visit and the whole exercise becomes far more relaxed.
Reading the rocks at low water
The thing that makes Chausey unlike anywhere else I have anchored is what happens at the bottom of the tide. On a big coefficient the water drops away to leave a moonscape of pink granite, sand and weed, with channels of green water winding between banks that were open sea a few hours before. It is genuinely beautiful, and it is also a reminder that the chart you are reading at high water describes a completely different place from the one you will be sitting in at low water.
So I sound carefully wherever I bring up, and I work out what the depth will be at the bottom of the tide, not just what it is when I arrive. On the moorings in the Sound you are generally fine, because they are laid to keep boats afloat, but if you anchor off you must allow the full range plus your draught plus a margin, and assume any soft patch of weed will not hold as well as clean sand. I also like to take the dinghy for a slow tour at half tide on the way down, partly for the pleasure of it and partly to see exactly what is drying out around me before the light goes.
Where it sits in a cruise
Chausey makes a natural pivot between Normandy and the start of the Brittany coast. From here the obvious next move is round to Saint-Malo and the Rance, and crews working west often pair Chausey with a run down towards the rivers of the Pink Granite Coast. If that is your direction, the Ile de Brehat and the Trieux river piece picks up the thread a day or two further on, and the North Brittany cruising guide sets out how the tidal gates of the whole coast string together.
The crossing to Chausey is one of the shortest passages in this guide and one of the most rewarding. It asks only that you respect the tide twice over, once to get out of Granville and once to get safely into the Sound. Do that, drop onto a buoy as the flood eases, and you have one of the loveliest anchorages in France almost to yourself.
