The first time I made Roscoff from the Scillies, I arrived two hours after the gannets did. They were diving off the Ile de Batz channel in the last of the daylight, and I had been so busy watching the chartplotter pick its way past the rocks that I nearly forgot to look up. North Brittany rewards the sailor who keeps one eye on the pilotage and one on the scenery, and the Bay of Morlaix is where that bargain pays off best.
This stretch of coast frightens people who have not sailed it. The charts look like someone tipped a bag of gravel across the approach. In practice the marks are excellent, the rock is hard and predictable, and the new marina at Bloscon takes the stress out of the arrival. What you need is a tide table you trust and the patience to wait for water when the bay asks you to.
Roscoff marina: the easy way in
Forget the old drying harbour by the town if you want a quiet night. The deep-water marina at Roscoff-Bloscon, opened in 2012 a short way south of the ferry terminal, is accessible at all states of the tide. It holds around 625 berths and takes vessels up to 30 metres with a draught of up to 3 metres, which means almost anything that has crossed the Channel will float there at low water.
Call the capitainerie on VHF channel 9 to be allocated a berth. While you are inside the breakwater you are expected to monitor channel 12, the working channel for the commercial port, because the Brittany Ferries ships from Plymouth and Cork share the same water. Give them room; a laden ferry does not stop for a yacht.
In August 2024 a 12.5-metre boat was paying around 46 euros a night here, which is fair for the shelter and the pontoon water and power. Expect figures in that region for 2025 and 2026, less in the shoulder season. The walk into the old town takes about twenty minutes and is worth it for the granite church tower and the smell of the onion-sellers' history, the famous Johnnies who once cycled British streets with strings of pink onions over the handlebars.
If you are arriving fresh from England and unsure of the formalities, read the Plymouth to L'Aberwrac'h passage notes before you commit to a landfall further west; Roscoff makes a gentler first French port than the rock-bound Aber.
The bay itself: a maze worth solving
The Bay of Morlaix sits between Roscoff and the granite humps of Carantec. It is a genuine cruising ground, not just a thoroughfare, and you can lose three or four days here happily. The two great landmarks are the Chateau du Taureau, a squat fort sitting alone on a rock in the middle of the bay, built to keep the English out in the sixteenth century, and the Ile Louet with its little white-and-black lighthouse keeper's cottage.
Tidal range is the thing to respect. At Roscoff the water can swing from around 2.7 metres at low water springs to roughly 7.6 metres at high water, and the biggest tides of the year push past 9 metres. That is a vertical movement that a sailor used to the Solent, never mind the Mediterranean, has to feel before it makes sense. It means an anchorage that looks like a swimming pool at high water can be a field of weed-covered boulders four hours later.
Two anchorages I keep going back to:
Penn al Lann, off Carantec, gives good holding in sand and a clear view of the Ile Louet. You sit in the channel between the islands with the Chateau du Taureau for company. It dries in parts, so choose your spot with the chart open and an allowance made for the day's coefficient.
The pool below the Ile de Batz, on the north side, is more exposed but lets you walk the island at low water and catch the small ferry across to Roscoff if you want a meal ashore without moving the boat.
Up the river to Morlaix town
The reach that surprises most visitors is the run up to Morlaix itself, roughly 5 nautical miles of drying channel from the last reliable deep water. You cannot do it casually. The channel dries, so you ride the flood up on a rising tide, time your arrival for the lock into the wet basin, and sit in the heart of a proper Breton town under that enormous railway viaduct.
The lock gives you a window either side of high water, so plan to arrive on the late flood and you will lock straight through. Once inside you are afloat permanently in the town basin, walking distance from the market, the bars and the chocolate shops. It is one of the few places in Brittany where you tie up among the houses rather than out at a soulless pontoon.
If the idea of timing a drying channel makes you nervous, you are not alone, and it is exactly the skill that separates Channel sailors from Med sailors. I wrote a longer piece on reading Brittany tides as a Mediterranean sailor that is worth a read before you commit your keel to a place that empties.
The Ile de Batz: the day trip you should not skip
Just across the channel from Roscoff lies the Ile de Batz, a low green island about a mile long that most cruising visitors sail straight past. That is a mistake. The passenger ferry runs across the narrow channel every half hour or so in season, taking around fifteen minutes, so you can leave the boat in the marina and spend a day ashore without moving her. The island has a lighthouse you can climb, a famous exotic garden grown in the surprising mildness of the Gulf Stream microclimate, and beaches of white sand that would not look out of place in the Caribbean on a sunny day.
For the sailor, the channel between Roscoff and the island carries a strong tidal stream, running hard on a big coefficient, so if you do take your own boat through rather than the ferry you want to be going with the stream, not against it. The anchorage in the pool on the south side of the island dries, which means it doubles as a clean berth for taking the ground if you fancy a scrub. The same rules apply here as everywhere in the bay: check the chart, allow for the day's range, and pick firm sand.
Arriving from England
Roscoff is a Brittany Ferries port, with regular crossings from Plymouth and from Cork in Ireland, which tells you something useful: this is a recognised point of arrival with all the infrastructure that implies. If you are crossing the Channel under your own keel and want a first French landfall that is forgiving, the deep-water marina here is far kinder than the rock-bound Abers further west, because you can arrive at any state of the tide and find a berth that floats you.
That said, do your homework on the formalities before you leave the UK. Post-Brexit the paperwork for a British boat arriving in France has changed, and Roscoff, as a commercial port, is exactly the kind of place where you want your documents in order. Carry your ship's papers, your passports and your insurance details where you can lay hands on them, and know the customs position before you tie up.
Practical notes for the visitor
Charts and pilot: carry an up-to-date large-scale chart of the bay. The SHOM coverage is excellent and the buoyage follows IALA Region A, so red marks are to port on the way in. Reeds and the Imray pilots both cover the approaches in detail and I would not enter the inner bay on electronics alone.
Fuel and water: Bloscon has the facilities you would expect of a modern marina, fuel berth included. Top up here rather than relying on the drying harbours, which give you no fuel at low water by definition.
Weather: this is exposed water once you leave the marina. A fresh northerly funnels straight into the bay and makes some of the anchorages untenable. Get a proper forecast before you anchor out, and have a bolt-hole in mind.
The Bay of Morlaix is one of those places that looks like hard work on paper and turns out to be the easiest pleasure once you are there. Take the deep-water marina for your nights, use the drying anchorages for your days, and ride the flood up to Morlaix at least once. If you are pressing on west afterwards, the Pink Granite Coast lies just to the east and makes a natural next leg, all rose-coloured rock and tucked-away pools.
One last thing. Before you scrub the bottom in a drying corner here, which plenty of bilge-keelers do, make sure you actually know the ground you are sitting on. Soft mud and a sloping hard sand bank are very different beds for a keel.
