The keel touched halfway up a drying creek near Treguier, and for about three seconds I told myself it was just weed. Then the boat stopped, leaned a degree, and the depth sounder gave up entirely. We had a falling tide, a stranger on board who had never run aground in his life, and roughly four hours before the bottom of the boat would be sitting in air. What you do in the first ten minutes after that touch decides whether the story ends as a pub anecdote or a haul-out bill.
This is not a panic situation in most French anchorages and estuaries, but it does reward a clear head and a fixed order of actions. The biggest mistakes I have watched people make all come from doing things in the wrong sequence: gunning the engine before checking which way the tide is going, or jumping straight to the radio when the boat would have floated off on its own in twenty minutes.
Stop and think before you stop the engine
The instinct is to slam the throttle astern. Sometimes that works, in the first few seconds, before the boat has settled. But if you have run up a sandbank with the tide pushing you on, full astern just sucks sand and mud into your engine's raw-water intake and packs it tighter under the hull. Knock the engine into neutral and take a breath. The clock you actually care about is not the engine, it is the tide.
So the first real question is the one nobody wants to answer in a hurry: is the tide rising or falling? On the French Atlantic and Channel coasts this matters enormously, because the tidal range is large. Saint-Malo sees one of the biggest ranges in Europe, more than 12 metres on a big spring, and a 12-metre range means the water can fall a long way before it comes back. On the Mediterranean the range is tiny, often under 30 centimetres, so a grounding there is a very different problem: the tide will not lift you off, full stop.
If you do not already know the state of the tide cold, you should. Working out the tide for the day is part of every passage plan, and the French system of tidal coefficients makes the size of the range easy to read at a glance once you know how it works.
The check that takes two minutes and can save the boat
Before you fight to get off, find out two things: are you taking on water, and is anyone hurt. Send someone below to look in the bilge and around the keel bolts and the stern gland. A hard grounding on rock can crack a hull or shift a keel, and you would much rather discover that now, with the option of staying put on a rising tide near help, than after you have wrenched the boat off into deep water and started to sink.
If water is coming in fast, that changes everything and you go straight to a distress or urgency call. The whole procedure, Mayday versus Pan-Pan, is laid out in the guide to the French distress and safety call procedure, and it is worth reading before you need it. For most soft groundings, though, there is no water and no injury, and you have time to work the problem.
Heel the boat to reduce your draught
A fin-keeled yacht draws less when it is leaned over, because the keel swings up towards the surface. This is the trick that gets more boats off than the engine does. There are several ways to induce heel:
- Send crew out onto the side that points towards deep water, sitting on the rail or hanging off the boom swung out over the side.
- Sheet the mainsail in hard with the boom guyed out to one side, so the wind heels you. If there is any breeze on the right quarter this alone can do it.
- Run a halyard to your dinghy or to a kedge anchor and pull the masthead down sideways. A surprising amount of leverage comes from the top of the rig.
Heel the boat towards the deep water, then drive gently off the way you came. You came in through water deep enough to float, so the way out is almost always astern along your own track, not forwards into the unknown.
Kedging: the most useful anchor trick a visitor can know
If heeling and a gentle nudge astern do not free you, run out a kedge. A kedge is simply a second anchor carried out away from the boat, dropped in deep water, and then winched in to haul yourself off. Row it out in the dinghy, or float it out on a fender if the dinghy is not deployed, drop it well into the deep, and take the line to your strongest winch.
Even when kedging does not pull you off immediately, it earns its keep on a falling tide for a different reason. It stops the boat being pushed further aground, and more importantly it holds you upright or controls which way you lean as you dry out. A yacht that falls towards deep water can flood through an open companionway or a cockpit locker. Kedging the masthead to hold the lean towards the shallow side keeps the openings up. On the big-range coasts of north Brittany and Normandy, drying out is a normal thing that bilge-keelers and even fin-keelers do on purpose, and the skill of drying out alongside a French harbour is the same skill you are now using by accident.
When to wait, and when to call
On a rising tide with no damage, the calm answer is often to do nothing dramatic. Lighten the boat if you can, move crew weight, drop a kedge to stop drifting further on, and wait. The flood will lift you off, frequently within an hour, and you motor away having lost nothing but dignity. Patience genuinely is a refloating technique.
You make the call to CROSS, the French coastguard, when the picture changes: you are holed and taking water, the boat is on rock with surf building, the falling tide will leave you exposed in a dangerous spot, or there is a medical problem on board. CROSS coordinates everything and you reach them on VHF channel 16 or by dialling 196 from any phone, free, around the clock. How the stations are divided and who answers off which stretch of coast is covered in the rundown of the French coastguard and CROSS.
One thing visitors from the UK should understand: the lifeboats are run by the SNSM, a volunteer charity like the RNLI, and a tow off a sandbank when nobody is in danger is not automatically free. The SNSM does not charge to save a life, but recovering a stranded but undamaged boat can be invoiced, and tow rates run from around 90 euros for a small job up to roughly 300 to 395 euros an hour for an all-weather boat. That is a strong reason to free yourself with a kedge and patience before reaching for the radio, when no life is at risk.
Afterwards
Once you are afloat, check the bilge again, run the engine and watch the water pump runs cold and clear, and look hard at the rudder bearing and steering. A grounding that felt soft can still have tweaked something. If the steering feels notchy or vague, deal with it before your next leg, and know that the worst case, total loss of steering, has its own set of fixes in the piece on jury-rig steering.
The creek near Treguier let us go on the flood with about an hour to spare, upright, dry, and slightly humbled. We had heeled her with the boom, kept a kedge out to hold the lean, and resisted the urge to do anything fast. That is the whole art of it: in the first ten minutes, slow down, read the tide, protect the hull and rudder, and let the sea do most of the lifting for you.
