We spent the last week on the Cap Sizun peninsula here in Finistère enjoying the fine weather brought by this spell of high pressure. The days have become gradually warmer. There are periods of quite strong wind, up to 30 kilometres per hour at times, but they come and go, perhaps with the tide.
The sailors of old painted big eyes at the bow of their ships, these eyes were supposed to protect the crews from the dangers of navigation. Finistère and its coastline, at the bow of Europe, in a “ship” with a planetary dimension, inspire this artistic and photographic work by Pierre Chantau. There are 200 such mosaic eyes around this coastline, to represent the 200 island municipalities just of the Finistère coast. They were painted in 2019 to highlight the climate emergency. Sadly Chantau died this week, at the age of 66. Many people came to pay respects at this eye, at Brézellec.
The hour change of Saturday evening makes a difference to daily life, though I am never actually able to describe why it does. There is after all, the same (or just a little more) amount of daylight, but to be able to leave the van door open until 8:30 pm, and not fix the screen shutters until then does make a difference.
It’s actually warm now as well, into the 20s yesterday, and will be the same later this afternoon.
We didn’t stay at the other prong of the peninsula very long, Pointe du Van. There was a poor cell phone signal, and it was the weekend. I’m quite happy to live with this in the week, but when the sport is on at the weekend having a decent strength signal is important for me. So we moved a few kilometres along the north coast of the peninsula to the Pointe de Brézellec, a mini-peninsula off the main one. There were a few other motorhomes housing weekend fishermen, but it was very quiet, and overlooked the cliffs and the ocean waves crashing into them.
We hiked another 20 miles or so of the Customs Officers Path, sedate in the easterly direction, but more of a challenge with some scrambly bits and airy places to the west. To the west also the path led to a deserted little beach, at Theolen, a place for naturists in the summer.
On Monday morning we moved on, up to the next peninsula of Finistère, Cap Crozon, but stopped on route for a night over at the splendid L’Aber beach. There were a few people around enjoying the weather, including the local secondary school’s after school sports programme. They arrived just after 3:30 pm for a couple of hours and played frisbee and soccer on pitches marked out by foot. There is also a sand-yachting school open already for the season with three groups of primary school kids each day.
The tide goes out at least for a kilometre here, and with a three kilometre long beach there is plenty of room for all. There was a varying strength wind off the ocean all day, but I have rarely heard such noise from a tide, enhanced perhaps due to the shale fringe to the beach, but so loud it was hard to here the radio even.
Safe Return Doubtful 
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