The pink granite coast keeps its two best harbours close together and makes you choose between them on the tide. Perros-Guirec, with its gated marina in the Linkin basin, is the practical base: shops, restaurants, a proper town and 820 berths behind a flap gate. Ploumanac'h, a couple of miles round the headland, is the one you photograph: a pool of buoy moorings held in by a submerged sill, ringed by boulders the colour of cooked salmon. Sail this coast and you will want both, and the trick is knowing how each one lets you in.
I came down to Perros-Guirec from the Bay of Morlaix expecting a postcard and found, as usual on this shore, a tidal puzzle. The granite really is that colour, the rocks really do pile up into impossible shapes, and almost every harbour sits behind a gate or a drying approach. That combination is the whole character of pink granite coast sailing, and these two ports are its heart.
Perros-Guirec: the Linkin gate
Perros-Guirec is the obvious place to base. The marina lies in the Bassin a Flot du Linkin, a wet dock behind a flap gate, with around 820 berths and roughly 80 kept for visitors, all afloat with water and electricity. The town climbs the hill behind it and has everything a cruiser needs: supermarkets, chandlery, restaurants and a beach.
The gate is the catch. It opens around high water for a window that varies with the coefficient, longer on springs, shorter on neaps, and outside that window you are not getting in or out. Waiting buoys lie just to the north-east of the entrance in a minimum of about 6 metres, so you have somewhere to sit if you arrive early. The sill master controls traffic with red and green lights, alternating priority and pointing you towards the visitor berths once you are through. Call the harbour on VHF channel 9, and get the gate timetable from the capitainerie the moment you arrive, because it drives your entire schedule.
Plan your departures and arrivals around the gate, not the other way round. I have watched visitors turn up an hour after closing and spend a long evening swinging on a waiting buoy, which is no fun when you had planned a tidy passage. Write the times on the back of your hand.
Ploumanac'h: the rock pool
If Perros-Guirec is the sensible choice, Ploumanac'h is the romantic one, and it is one of the most beautiful small harbours in France. The approach is a winding, marked channel that dries, threading between pink granite humps, and it leads to a pool whose water is held in by a submersible sill set at roughly 2.55 metres above datum. That sill is what keeps the pool full when the tide drops, and it is what limits when and which boats can get in.
Inside you pick up a fore-and-aft mooring between lines of buoys rather than coming alongside a pontoon. The harbour has a capacity of around 350 places, of which about 200 are afloat on buoys and the rest dry out, with roughly 20 buoys traditionally kept for visitors. Two waiting buoys marked VPG sit in the channel in a minimum of about 1.5 metres. Listen on VHF channel 9. It is a tight, fiddly entrance and I would not attempt it for the first time in poor light or any swell, but once you are tucked inside with the lighthouse glowing at sunset you understand why people go to the trouble.
Get the sill timing wrong here and you sit on it, so treat the tide with the respect you would give any drying out in a Brittany harbour, because that is precisely what this is.
Les Sept-Iles: the reason to come this far
Offshore, a few miles north of the two harbours, lies the Sept-Iles archipelago, France's oldest seabird reserve and the only place in the country with a breeding colony of northern gannets. The island of Rouzic has carried well over 20,000 pairs of breeding seabirds at recent counts, and on a still morning you hear them long before you see them, a wall of noise rolling off the white-streaked rock.
You can sail out and circle the islands, keeping the required distance off the protected colonies, or take one of the trip boats from Perros-Guirec if you would rather not navigate it yourself. Puffins, gannets, guillemots and grey seals all use the islands. It is the single best wildlife encounter on this coast and well worth timing a calm-weather day for. The wider story of the Sept-Iles gannets by boat is worth reading before you go so you know what you are looking at and where you may and may not approach.
Ashore at Perros-Guirec
Of the two, Perros-Guirec is where you spend your time on land, and it is a proper resort town rather than a fishing village got up for tourists. The marina sits below the town centre, with the long beaches of Trestraou and Trestrignel a short walk or bus ride away. Trestraou is where the boats leave for the Sept-Iles, and it is also the start of the most famous walk on this coast: the customs officers' path, the sentier des douaniers, which winds along the clifftops through the wildest of the pink granite formations between Perros-Guirec and Ploumanac'h.
That walk is the thing to do on a day when the tide is wrong for moving the boat. It runs for a couple of miles past rocks shaped like skulls, bottles and crouching animals, with the lighthouse at Ploumanac'h glowing at the end of it. Do it on foot and you see the coast from the angle the photographs are taken, then sail past the same rocks the next morning and recognise them from the water. For the town itself there are supermarkets, a chandlery, restaurants and the usual resort facilities, which makes Perros-Guirec a sensible place to reprovision and sort the boat before pushing on.
Working the two together
The smart way to do this stretch is to base at Perros-Guirec for its facilities and make Ploumanac'h a day-trip or a single special night when the tide suits. Both gates and sills open around high water, so on a given day you may find one accessible while the other is not; let the tide tables choose your itinerary rather than fighting them.
From Perros-Guirec you are well placed to explore the whole coast either side. Come down from the Bay of Morlaix and Roscoff and this makes a natural base for a few days, or carry on west towards Trebeurden, where the Trebeurden marina in Lannion bay has a deeper, easier sill than Ploumanac'h and rounds off the pink granite run.
A practical tip for the gate ports: keep a running note of the high-water times and coefficients for your whole stay, not just the next tide. The window at Perros-Guirec stretches and shrinks with the coefficient, longer on springs and tighter on neaps, so a plan that worked on a big tide may leave you short a couple of days later. I keep the figures written up in the cockpit where the whole crew can see them, because the question "can we still get in?" comes up a lot on this coast and it saves a scramble for the almanac. The same discipline serves you at every gated harbour from here to the Channel, and it is the single habit that separates a relaxed pink granite cruise from a fraught one.
The short version
- Perros-Guirec: about 820 berths, roughly 80 for visitors, behind a flap gate that opens around HW. Waiting buoys NE of the entrance in about 6 m. VHF 9.
- Ploumanac'h: about 350 places, roughly 200 afloat on buoys, about 20 for visitors, behind a sill at about 2.55 m. Waiting buoys marked VPG in about 1.5 m. VHF 9.
- Sept-Iles: France's oldest seabird reserve, over 20,000 pairs on Rouzic, the only French gannet colony. Keep the required distance off.
This is a coast you sail on a plan built around the tide tables and the gate times, never on a whim. Do that, and Perros-Guirec and Ploumanac'h give you the full pink granite experience, a practical town base and a fairytale rock pool, with the great seabird reserve a short sail offshore.
