Two small islands, no cars worth speaking of, white-sand bays the colour of the Caribbean on a sunny day, and a fraction of the boats you would find off Belle-Ile across the water. Houat and Hoedic are where I take guests when I want them to think I am a sailing genius who has found somewhere secret. I have not, of course. Every French family with a boat in Quiberon Bay knows them. But on a weekday in June, anchored off the great beach at Treac'h er Goured with the engine off and a coffee in hand, you would be hard pressed to argue.
Both islands lie in the mouth of the bay, roughly between the Quiberon peninsula and Belle-Ile. Houat is the larger and busier of the two; Hoedic, a couple of miles further south, is smaller, lower and even quieter. Neither is more than a short hop from the mainland marinas, which is part of the appeal: you can be at anchor off a near-deserted beach within a couple of hours of leaving a pontoon.
A word on the names before we go on, because foreign crews mangle them and the locals notice. Houat is roughly "oo-AT", Hoedic closer to "oh-eh-DEEK". Both come from the Breton, Houat meaning duck and Hoedic the little duck, which is a fair description of how they sit low on the water when you raise them from a distance. Houat measures only about five kilometres end to end and Hoedic barely two and a half, so neither takes long to walk, and both are effectively car-free, the few vehicles on Houat belonging to the handful of permanent islanders.
Houat: where to drop the hook
The headline anchorage at Houat is Treac'h er Goured, the long sweep of sand on the south-east of the island. It is a popular, well-used spot, sheltered from the prevailing south-west through to north-west winds, which covers most of what a Breton summer throws at you. The bottom is clean sand, and that is the single most important fact about anchoring here: sand gives you the kind of holding a CQR, Delta or Rocna will dig into and stay put in, unlike the kelp-and-rock mix you fight further out.
Anchor on the paler patches. From the cockpit on a bright day you can read the bottom by colour, sand reflects light and shows up pale, weed and rock show dark, so aim the boat at the lightest water you can find before you let go. Pick a darker patch and you will dance to the anchor all night.
Give yourself proper scope. The Morbihan does not have Saint-Malo's enormous range, but you still get several metres of rise and fall on springs, and the bay shoals gently, so a chain that looked generous at high water can leave you short at low. I work on at least four times the maximum depth in chain and check the swinging circle against my neighbours and against the drying line before I settle. Treac'h er Goured is wide and the swinging room is good, which is exactly why it works as an overnight.
The drawback is obvious from the chart: it is open to the east and south-east. If the wind backs into that quarter, or a swell wraps in, get out before dark. The standard move is to shift round to one of the bays on the other side of the island, or run for the small harbour at Saint-Gildas on the north coast. The little port dries, so it is a tide-dependent option for a keelboat, but it is the bolt-hole when the wind turns ugly.
There are other bays worth knowing on Houat. Treac'h Salus, on the western end, gives shelter from a different quarter and works when the wind is in the north, and there are smaller pockets of sand around the island that take an anchor in the right conditions. The point is to think of Houat as a wind rose: there is almost always one bay that will give you a lee, but rarely the same one for two days running, so be prepared to up-anchor and shift round as the wind clocks. That is the rhythm of cruising these islands, you follow the shelter rather than expecting it to come to you.
Hoedic: smaller, lower, lovelier
Hoedic is the one I send people to when they have already done Houat and want something even slower. The island's harbour, Port de l'Argol, is on the north-west side, a small drying basin with a breakwater, again best treated as a tidal affair if you have any draft. Most cruising boats anchor off rather than go in. There are bays around the island that take an anchor in settled weather, and the holding, where it is sand, is as good as Houat's.
The trade-off cuts the same way as it does everywhere out here: there is almost no all-weather shelter. These are exposed Atlantic islands. They are glorious in a settled high-pressure spell and a genuinely bad idea to be committed to if a front is coming through. Watch the forecast, and treat both islands as fair-weather stops rather than safe harbours.
Ashore, Hoedic has a single tiny village, a handful of bar-restaurants in season, a church, and tracks across the heath to empty beaches. You walk it end to end in under an hour. Houat has a slightly bigger village above the main port and more in the way of a creperie or two. On both, water and provisioning are limited, so do not arrive expecting to reprovision. Top up your tanks and your fridge on the mainland first.
Fitting them into a cruise
The islands sit naturally on a Quiberon Bay circuit. From La Trinite-sur-Mer it is a comfortable morning's sail out to Houat, and Belle-Ile is only a few miles further west if you want to combine them. I almost always work the two islands into a longer loop rather than treating them as a destination in their own right, and they slot neatly into a relaxed two-week south Brittany itinerary that also takes in the Gulf of Morbihan and the rivers.
If you are sailing down from the marinas around Carnac, the same passage that brings you to Houat puts La Trinite, Belle-Ile and the bays of Quiberon all within a day of each other. The broader picture of holding grounds, weed and tidal range across the region is worth understanding before you commit to a night on the hook, and I have set that out in detail in the guide to anchoring in Brittany.
For a bad-weather alternative when the islands are untenable, the sheltered run up the Odet river to Quimper further west is the classic escape, flat water and trees instead of an exposed beach in a building swell. It pays to have that card in your back pocket before you sail out to Houat in the first place.
A few hard-won pointers. Arrive at Treac'h er Goured early on a fine weekend in July or August; it gets busy and the best swinging room near the beach goes first. Buoy your anchor if there is any chance you are dropping over rock at the edges. Keep an anchor watch, or at least a transit on the chartplotter, the first night until you trust the holding. And do not be the boat that anchors too close to a stranger and then complains about the swing, the bay is big enough for everyone if you space out.
Houat and Hoedic are not secret and they are not safe-all-weather harbours. What they are is a pair of low, sandy, almost car-free islands with some of the cleanest anchoring in southern Brittany, a short reach from the mainland, and a view that makes guests think you know what you are doing. Pick your weather, read the sand, give yourself scope, and they will be the days everyone remembers from the cruise.
