Some harbours you arrive at. Morlaix you have to earn. The town sits at the head of a long, narrow river that dries out almost completely, three miles or so above the last reliable water, and the only way to tie up among the houses is to ride the flood up and lock through into a wet basin that keeps you afloat. I have done it twice now, and both times the same thing happened: a knot of nerves on the way up, then a grin once the gates shut behind me and the boat sat still under the great stone viaduct with the town humming around it.
This is not a passage to attempt casually, and that is exactly why it is worth doing. Most cruisers come into north Brittany, take a berth at Roscoff, eat their galettes and move on. Morlaix asks a bit more of you. It rewards you with a berth in the centre of a real working town rather than a pontoon on the edge of nowhere.
Reading the bay before you commit
Morlaix sits at the bottom of the Baie de Morlaix, the rock-strewn bay you cross to reach the river mouth. If you have come down from the Channel Islands or across from Plymouth, you will likely have stopped at Roscoff first, and the bay between the two is its own little cruising ground. I covered the approaches, the Chateau du Taureau and the deep-water marina in the Roscoff and Bay of Morlaix guide, and I would read that before pointing the bow up the river. The bay is where the pilotage is busiest. Once you are past Carantec and lined up for the channel, the hard part is timing, not rock-dodging.
The tides here are big. At Roscoff the range swings from roughly 2.7 metres at low water springs to about 7.6 metres at high water springs, and the biggest tides of the year push past 9 metres. That vertical movement is the engine that floats you up to the town. It is also the thing that will leave you sitting on the mud if you misjudge it, so the day's coefficient matters. Sailors who have only known the Mediterranean find this hard to feel at first, and I wrote a separate piece on reading Brittany tides as a Mediterranean sailor for anyone in that boat.
The drying channel and the lock window
The channel up to Morlaix dries. That is the whole story in three words. You cannot wander up at any state of the tide, poke your nose in, and back out if you do not like it. You commit on a rising tide, you ride the flood up, and you arrive at the lock with water under you.
The marina is reached through a lock, and the gate opens in a window around high water: roughly 1.5 hours before high tide, through high water, and up to about 1 hour after. That gives you a working window of a couple of hours either side of the top of the tide to get in. Plan your run up the river so you reach the lock comfortably inside that window, with the flood still making, and you will lock straight through without circling.
A port agent is stationed at the lock to meet visitors and point you to a berth, which takes a lot of the guesswork out of a first arrival. One firm rule: there are no navigation lights along the river, so Morlaix is not accessible at night. If your tidal window falls in darkness, you wait for the next one. Do not be tempted to feel your way up an unlit drying channel in the dark to save twelve hours.
The basin in the heart of the town
Once the gates shut, you are afloat for as long as you like. The Port de plaisance de Morlaix holds around 200 berths on pontoons and along the quay, and takes vessels with a draught up to 3 metres, which floats almost anything that has crossed the Channel. Call the capitainerie on VHF channel 9 as you come up the river so they know you are inbound.
What you get for the effort is rare. The basin sits in the middle of Morlaix, walking distance from the market, the bars, the chocolate shops and the half-timbered medieval houses on the steep lanes off the main square. You step off the pontoon and you are in the town, not a fifteen-minute trudge from it. The enormous granite railway viaduct strides across the valley above your mast, lit at night, and it becomes the backdrop to every evening you spend aboard.
The town earns its keep beyond the postcard. There is a proper chandlery within reach, supermarkets for a full reprovision, and trains out to Brest and Paris from the station under that viaduct if a crew member has to leave. For a place that takes some getting into, it is remarkably easy to live in once you are there.
Anchorages and a day off
If your tidal window does not line up, or you fancy a quiet night before the run up, the bay below gives you options. Penn al Lann off Carantec offers good holding in sand with a clear view of the Ile Louet and its little lighthouse-keeper's cottage. Parts of it dry, so anchor with the chart open and an allowance made for the day's range. It makes a calm staging post to sit out a tide and go up to the town fresh in the morning.
A day off the boat is easy here too. The passenger ferry from Roscoff across to the Ile de Batz runs roughly every half hour in season and takes about fifteen minutes, so you can leave the boat in the marina, walk the low green island, climb its lighthouse and visit the exotic garden grown in the Gulf Stream mildness. It is one of the better day trips in north Brittany and you do not have to move your own keel to do it.
Pressing on east or west
Morlaix is a destination, not a thoroughfare, so you generally come in, enjoy it, and leave the way you came. From the bay you have choices in both directions. East lies the rose-coloured rock of the Pink Granite Coast, a natural next leg full of tucked-away pools and good anchorages. West, the coast hardens towards the tidal gates of the Iroise, and anyone heading that way will want to understand the Chenal du Four and Raz de Sein passage long before they get there.
The general north Brittany picture, harbours, hazards and the order to take them in, lives in the north Brittany cruising guide. Read it for the strategy, then come back here for the tactics of the river.
The town itself, once you are tied up
Morlaix repays the effort of getting there with a town that most cruising visitors never see, because they stop short at Roscoff. The old quarter climbs the steep valley sides in a tangle of cobbled lanes, lined with tall half-timbered houses, some of them medieval, built by the linen and tobacco merchants who made the place rich when this was one of Brittany's busiest ports. The most famous of them, the maisons a pondalez, have an internal spiral stair and an open well of a hall rising several floors, and a couple are open to visitors.
The viaduct dominates everything. It carries the Paris to Brest railway 58 metres above the valley floor on two tiers of granite arches, and from the basin you look straight up at it. Walk up onto the streets that run along its level and you get the town from above, the river threading down the middle, the masts of the marina poking up among the rooftops. It is one of the more striking urban settings of any harbour on this coast.
For the practical crew, the town has everything: a proper covered market on Saturdays, supermarkets a short walk from the pontoons, banks, pharmacies, and the chocolate and biscuit shops that Brittany does so well. If someone has to come or go, the station under the viaduct puts you a couple of hours from Paris by TGV. Few harbours combine real shelter, a berth in the centre of things and that level of connection.
What I would tell a first-timer
Carry a large-scale chart of the bay and the river. The SHOM coverage is excellent and the buoyage follows IALA Region A, so red marks are to port on the way in, but I would not run that channel on electronics alone. Work out your tidal window the day before, build in a margin, and aim to arrive at the lock on the late flood rather than scraping in on the last of the gate.
Top up fuel and water in the basin while you are floating, because a drying channel gives you nothing at low water by definition. And take the trip seriously without being frightened by it. Thousands of boats go up to Morlaix every season. The river dries, the lock has a window, the town has no lights: respect those three facts and the rest is one of the most satisfying arrivals on this coast.
