S/V Spindrift

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Grand Finale -June 4 to 11

I’m sitting in the Star Alliance lounge at CDG, on my way home to EWR. My life used to be full of these. I was kind of a business class lounge lizard. Not anymore, now that I’m retired. And I don’t miss it. S/V Spindrift is up on her stands in Cap d’Agde, and a long layover might be good for some food and a chance to finish this last blog of the spring season, picking up where the last one left off. I’ll be home in about ten hours.

We slalomed through the fishing fleet at 0230 UTC, 0430 local on June 4, one eye on the screen, and slipped into the inner harbor just as the sun started to light up the sky.

Cap d’Agde’s inner harbor was not designed for a 60-foot boat. Tight corners and close pontoons, with a couple of shallow spots that matter. And for the record, S/V Spindrift doesn’t have a bow thruster, which makes us very, very cautious about what we attempt. So far we’ve made it work, though we’ve needed an assist from the tender plenty of times. This morning we got in clean, unassisted, with the harbor just beginning to stir.

Our early arrival gave Thibaut a chance to catch a morning train back to his hometown in Calais. Bob and I retired to our bunks and made up the sleep we’d lost, then found a slip we could call home for the next five days while we waited for our turn at the travel lift.

We made the most of the wait. Mostly we caught up. Two guys who sailed together at URI and in Watch Hill, RI, a few decades on, with the boat finally still and the clock stopped. The conversations you can’t have on watch, when half your head is on the plotter and the boat speed, we had on the dock over a beer. A good part of it this time was about putting health first and discussing retirements and adventure, the conversation that shows up as you get older and never came up back in the college days.

We rented a car and ran up to Marseille for a day. Took the tourist trolley up to Notre-Dame de la Garde for the view over the whole sprawl and the islands offshore, wandered the Vieux-Port as the fish market packed up, got happily lost in the back lanes of Le Panier, and sat down to a long, proper French lunch before pointing back west.

Then there’s the beach. And I should be honest about where we’d parked the boat.

Anyone who knows Cap d’Agde knows what it’s famous for. This is the naturist capital of Europe, an entire purpose-built quarter where clothing isn’t so much optional as quietly frowned upon. Thousands of people. A village naturiste with its own shops, restaurants, banks, the works, and not a stitch on anyone using them. You haven’t lived until you’ve watched grown women walk into a grocery store stark naked, buy their baguettes, and stroll home, everything out and entirely unbothered.

We wandered down to the beach for a swim. A few field notes. Board shorts make you the most overdressed man on the beach by a mile, and the locals look at you like you’re the pervert. And nothing prepares you for the entire human inventory laid out in direct sun, with Isaac Newton’s theories on full display. Before you ask: no, we did not hold up better than the field. Time has had its way with us too. We kept the shorts on, a little out of modesty and mostly as a public service.

June 9 was haul day, and the wind turned up for it. A real breeze straight down the basin, enough to send my blood pressure up and have me double-checking that the insurance was up to date. We got our turn at the travel-lift at 1030 UTC, 1230 local. Thomas, the yard manager at Sud Croisières, ran the lift like a man who’s done it ten thousand times, because he has. Earlier he’d reassured me he’d never dropped a boat. Not yet, I thought, and kept that to myself. Straps set, S/V Spindrift came up out of the water clean and weighed in at 26.2 metric tons. Over to the hard stand and blocked, square and even, without one bad moment on a day that had every excuse to hand us a shit storm.

The yard here is home to CNB, the French builder that’s turned out high-end cruising sailboats since 1987 and joined the Bénéteau group in 1992. Sud Croisières is CNB’s sole distributor in France, and it has the feel of a place that takes the sea seriously. I got to talking with Valentin, the owner’s son, and one number he mentioned has stuck with me. Of the roughly 300 boats they’ve launched, 35 have been lost to tempests in the Mediterranean, and most of those had a professional captain aboard. More than one in ten, taken by weather, in a sea that spends half the summer looking like a swimming pool. The Med’s weather doesn’t care about your program. We’d had our own taste of it back in April, a DANA that came through Adra at 62 knots while we sat tied up alongside. You can love this sea and know your boat cold and still end up a line in someone’s tally. I walked back to the boat humbled, and thinking, the whole way.

You spend enough days in a yard and you start noticing the locals, even the fussy ones. Every boatyard has a dog. In Lagos it was a Portuguese water dog, all black curls and energy, right down to the one white paw that Spinnaker had. Spinnaker was my fierce companion for years. We lost him a couple of years ago, and I miss him more than I let on. I stopped to say hello to that dog every time I came down the dock. At this haul-out it’s a pit bull nobody could give me a name for, who runs the yard like he holds the lease and sleeps in whatever shade the travel-lift leaves behind.

I love these yard dogs. There’s one in every yard we’ve pulled into, and they’re a small, good reminder that you’re back on land. The working kind of land, where a dog still gets a vote.

With her up on the stands, the whole season comes into view. We splashed her out of Lagos back in the spring and have barely stopped moving since, down through Gibraltar, along the Spanish coast, over to the Balearics, and up here to France. She feels more like ours now than she did in March.

We got her ready for the summer pause in our expedition. Fresh-water flush, gear stowed, lockers cleaned out, the decommissioning list ticked off line by line. We donated the leftover food, and for our last meal aboard we built a charcuterie board out of what was left.

On the 11th, Bob and I started home.

By the numbers: about 1,250 nautical miles and seventy-five days since the spring relaunch in Lagos, across three countries. Portugal, Spain, and France. At least 1,000 of those miles were just Sarah and me, the two of us alone. We’ve been at this since we launched S/V Spindrift in September of 2025.

We’ll be back to see S/V Spindrift in early September, when we take her along the coast to the Cannes Yachting Festival. From there we point her east into the Mediterranean, and then out across the Atlantic in the winter of 2027-2028.

Fair winds from S/V Spindrift