Nowhere I have sailed grows fishing pots quite like south Brittany. From the approaches to Lorient down through the Glenan and out around Belle-Ile, the surface is freckled with little buoys, some bright and obvious, many faded grey and almost invisible in a chop, all of them trailing a pickup line that can float just under the surface and reach straight for your propeller. Add a strong tide laying those lines flat across your course and you have the perfect trap. The day I caught one off the Iles de Glenan, the engine note dropped, the shaft shuddered, and the boat slewed as though someone had thrown out an anchor. Which, in effect, they had.
Here is what to do when it happens, and how to avoid most of them in the first place.
The moment it happens
A fouled prop announces itself unmistakably. The engine bogs down, revs drop, you may hear a thump and feel a vibration, and the boat loses drive or stops. Your first action is the opposite of your instinct: knock the gear into neutral immediately, then idle or stop the engine. Keep driving and you wind the line tighter, and on a shaft drive the friction can be ferocious. There are accounts from the waters off Barfleur of polypropylene melting into a solid welded mass around a shaft because the skipper kept the revs on. Stop turning the prop and you keep the problem small.
If you still have sails up, or can get them up, do so, because you have just lost your engine and you need another way to keep the boat under control. This is exactly the situation that the broader piece on engine failure in the Raz de Sein deals with, and the same principle applies in calmer water: a boat with steerage way is a boat in control.
Get the boat safe before you touch the line
Do not go straight over the side. The first job is to make the boat safe to work alongside. Look around: how much sea room do you have, which way is the tide setting you, what is downwind and downtide. Off the Glenan in summer this is usually benign, flat water and light airs, but the tide still runs and you do not want to drift onto a rock or another pot while your head is underwater.
If there is any sea room concern, anchor. Drop the hook, let it bite, and now you have a stable platform that is not going anywhere. If you are in deep water with no anchoring option and conditions are kind, heave to under headsail to slow the boat and create a slick. Either way, the principle is that the boat must be settled and predictable before a person gets in the water beside a hull that could surge.
Clearing the line
For a line round the prop, the practical fix is almost always to cut it free, and that means someone in the water. Brittany sea temperatures in summer sit around 16 to 18 degrees, cool enough to sap you fast, so think about the swimmer's limits honestly. Working underwater means swimming down a metre and a half or so and holding for 15 to 30 seconds at a time, very likely several times over. Carry a proper mask and a serrated knife on a lanyard, and rig a boarding ladder or a loop of line over the side before anyone gets in, because climbing back aboard a topsides with no foothold, tired and cold, is harder than it sounds.
Send the swimmer in on a tether held by someone in the cockpit, and switch the engine off at the key with the swimmer's agreement, never leave it in a state where it could be bumped into gear. Cut the line off the shaft and propeller a piece at a time, working the loops loose, and pass the cut ends up to the boat so they do not refoul. A wrap that looks hopeless usually comes off in layers once you find the bitter end.
If the swimmer cannot manage it, the water is too cold or too rough, or you simply do not have anyone able to do it safely, that is a legitimate reason to call for help. There is no shame in it, and a fouled prop with no danger to life is a Pan-Pan or a routine call, handled exactly as set out in the French distress and safety call procedure.
A word about the pot you fouled
If the line is part of a working pot, you have probably parted someone's gear, and the polite thing is to retrieve what you can and, where practical, let the local capitainerie or the fishermen know. Cutting a pot loose costs a fisherman real money, and visiting boats already carry a reputation in some harbours for ploughing through gear. Leaving the marker attached to the cut line, where you safely can, at least gives the owner a chance of recovering it.
How to not catch the next one
Most pot foulings are avoidable, and avoidance is far easier than clearing. A few habits that have kept me out of trouble in Breton waters:
- Keep a proper lookout in pot country, especially with the sun ahead, when low buoys vanish into the glare. Slow down if you cannot see clearly.
- Watch how the pots are laid. Fishermen set them in lines, so once you spot the pattern you can read where the next one will be and steer between strings rather than across them.
- Beware the tide. A strong stream lays the pickup line flat downtide of the buoy, sometimes 20 or 30 metres of it floating just under the surface, so give buoys a wide berth on their downtide side, not just the buoy itself.
- In the worst areas, post a bow lookout and have the engine ready to go to neutral the instant you see a line.
Anchoring among the pots demands the same care. When you pick a spot in a busy bay you want to drop where your swing will not foul gear or other boats, and the same discipline that keeps you off the pots also helps when you are dragging anchor at night and need clear water around you to recover. Reading the bottom and the surface together is the whole skill.
What to carry, before you ever foul one
The boats that deal calmly with a fouled prop are the ones that prepared for it on a quiet afternoon, not the ones improvising in the moment. A small kit lives aboard mine specifically for this:
- A sharp serrated knife on a float and a lanyard, so it cannot be dropped to the bottom.
- A decent diving mask, and a snorkel, kept somewhere reachable, not buried in the lazarette.
- A short wetsuit or at least a rash vest, because Breton water at 16 to 18 degrees pulls heat out of you faster than you expect, and a cold swimmer makes mistakes.
- A boarding ladder that deploys from the water, or a knotted line, so a tired swimmer can climb out unaided.
- A line cutter on the prop shaft is the belt-and-braces fix some cruisers fit, designed to chop a wrapped line before it stalls the engine. They are not foolproof, but in pot-heavy waters they earn their keep.
Just as important is the habit of knowing where you are relative to help. South Brittany falls under CROSS Etel, which covers the whole Bay of Biscay from the Pointe de Penmarch to the Spanish border, reachable on VHF channel 16 or by dialling 196, free, day or night. If you do end up needing a tow because nobody can clear the prop, the structure of who answers and how is set out in the overview of the French coastguard and CROSS. And the same financial reality applies here as everywhere on this coast: the SNSM volunteer lifeboats save life for free but invoice for recovering an undamaged boat, with rates climbing into the hundreds of euros an hour, which is one more reason to be able to clear a line yourself.
What the Glenan taught me
We anchored, I went in on a tether with a bread knife of all things, and twenty minutes and three dives later the shaft was clear, the cut line coiled on the side deck for the harbourmaster. The boat never drifted because the hook was down, the swimmer never got into trouble because there was a ladder and a tender alongside, and the engine never bumped into gear because the key was out and in my pocket. The fouling was bad luck. Everything after it was a series of unhurried, deliberate steps, and that is what turns a fouled pot off Brittany from a drama into a slightly cold half hour you laugh about over dinner ashore.
