Preparing for phase 2 of operation “Oui Oui Baguette”.
When last you left our heroes, @Zoë O'Connell, @Sylvia Knight, and me, we had snuggled Scarlet down in the marina at the delightful Brittany town of Tréguier, and turned off everything including her 12 volt system because the marina there doesn’t like you leaving boats connected to shore power unattended. Whatever.
On Saturday we fly to Nantes which a slightly different line-up: me and Zoe again, but also joined by Sara, who comes from the land of the bouys being the wrong colours.
Anyway, our objective is the French yachtie town of Bénodet, at the northern end of the Bay of Biscay. There s basically an end of level boss between the English Channel and Biscay called the Raz de Sein (pronounced RAAAAAAAAH!, apparently)
This is a gap of
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Preparing for phase 2 of operation “Oui Oui Baguette”.
When last you left our heroes, @Zoë O'Connell, @Sylvia Knight, and me, we had snuggled Scarlet down in the marina at the delightful Brittany town of Tréguier, and turned off everything including her 12 volt system because the marina there doesn’t like you leaving boats connected to shore power unattended. Whatever.
On Saturday we fly to Nantes which a slightly different line-up: me and Zoe again, but also joined by Sara, who comes from the land of the bouys being the wrong colours.
Anyway, our objective is the French yachtie town of Bénodet, at the northern end of the Bay of Biscay. There s basically an end of level boss between the English Channel and Biscay called the Raz de Sein (pronounced RAAAAAAAAH!, apparently)
This is a gap of a couple of kilometres where the Atlantic gets squeezed through a 15km long ridge, culminating the the Île de Sein, and the mainland. The gal is characterised by over falls and tide races into which the tide forces the water which has nowhere to go but … up
Chaotically
The passage notes from all sources share one thing: they implore people to be really wary of this place. Apparently you go through in the calmest weather you can at slack tide. You’ve got something like a 30 minute window in which you need to arrive and then you just … GO. Miss that window, and the sea will try and murder you, and might actually succeed.
Immediately north of the RAAAAAAAH, is another inshore passage called the Chenal du Four, which looks scary on the chart but which is a pussy cat. The only issue with it is that it’s a tidal gate. As the Raz is also a tidal gate, despite being quite close to each other, you can’t really pass through them on the same day unless things align precisely. Next week they do not, so we will be overnighting at the small marina of Camaret-sur-Mer.
We have been checking the developing weather forecasts. They are characterised by an Atlantic low coming through Monday and Tuesday, followed by several days of flat calm weather.
Our plan is to hunker down at L’Aber Wrac’h, the last safe haven going west on the southern shore of the English Channel, and wait out the low, then go for it. Chenal do Four, Raz de Sein, anchor overnight in the bay of Audierne, and then sail leisurely to Bénodet, where we await phase 3, the final phase of Oui Oui Baguette which gets us to La Rochelle for the winter, and the launch point for Operation Churro next year.
We have two scenarios. The nice, low stress one is to sail to the port of Roscoff on Sunday and then have a short sail to L’Aber Wrac’h on Monday, followed by a day off, and then run for Biscay. This very much depends on precisely when the low arrives. 36 hours ago it was looking like Monday would be doable, but we would end up exhausted and covered in our own vomit. It’s looking a bit better today, but still marginal.
The alternate plan is to do Tréguier to L’Aber Wrac’h in one shot on Sunday. This is a 73 nautical mile passage which will take about 14-15 hours and requires us to depart Tréguier the moment there is enough daylight to see what we are doing. We need to exit the river before the flood tide starts, which is about half an hour after sunrise, then fight the eastbound tide for a few hours until it turns and starts pushing us west again.
That will be a LONG day and I’d rather not do it, so I hoping for better weather. Let’s see.
Thank you for the update. Glad to see you’re moving on. I was starting to think you’d bought a chateau and would be settling down to make renovation YouTubes like all the other ex pats dans les pays.
Sarah, I've sailed the Raz - it was so rough the autopilot gave up in disgust and we were on the wheel for hours. Biscay was worse - heading from La Coruna NW the weather turned so bad half way across and the seas were so high we ended up diverting to Bilbao and then going N hugging the West Coast to Brest. Fun times!
@Mel Jane @Sylvia Knight @Zoë O'Connell had a similar autopilot “you’re on your own, mate” episode rounding Beachy when it blew up to a 7 gusting 8. That was fun.
RAAAAH! Looks like you've got yourselves a convoy.
I'd forgotten to look for a day or two then clicked on the bookmark and saw you're at the exciting bit and making good progress. Good luck with the rest of the trip.
@andrewducker I knew someone who claims that the brain should be considered as an organ like the stomach, secreting ideas and worries because it's a brain (sometimes getting ill, or having a bad day, or whatever), it's what it does, like the stomach secrete's acid and gurgles. And that it's that we worry about worrying, more than we worry about our stomach stomaching that's the real problem.
@chiffchaff @andrewducker it's an intriguing model. I'm not sure how far it supports the conclusions though. If I have recurring stomach aches then it seems reasonable to ask if I'm throwing the wrong stuff at my stomach.
So delighted at the news from France. Definitely needed that. The French two-round system may be bonkers but it does give the public the chance to say “non” to an inadvisable outcome from the first round.
It’s not bonkers. It’s not as good as ranked choice. It’s FPTP but “Vote! No, vote properly!” which could be better but is certainly not as bad as the UK system (apart from the (Northern) Irish system which youse should all adopt).
♪ Right now you are down and out And feelin' really crappy […] And when I see how sad you are It sorta makes me happy […] Human nature- Nothing I can do It's Schadenfreude Making me feel glad that I'm not you♫
Commiserations to Emily Brothers who failed to win her election as the first openly transgender woman to parliament, but also congrats on avoiding the awkward conversation with her boss about which parliamentary loo she should use.
Pervasive microplastics equals infertility. I've disliked Atwood since I first encountered her many moons ago, precisely because I think she is prescient
Yeah we really need PR, however some parties have gotten very good at targeting. The Lib Dems went for the seats they knew they could win and that's it.
I think at this point I'm off to bed, and will see the results in the morning. Not least so I don't have to listen to any more right wing politicians tonight.
@Eleanor LNR Blair They are fucking terrible human beings and I hate that the media gives them a near monopoly on public discourse. We will never have an equitable society while we have a public discourse dominated by ghastly cunts engaging in performative cruelty.
I've finally realised what I am reminded of by the end stage of obsessive transphobes like Lineman and Rowling, who start out "having concerns" and end up empty hollow shells of human beings, their friends and family having given up on them, or been driven away, probably neglecting their personal hygiene and health for days on end while they rant about their foaming conspiracy theories on Twitter:
Heroin addicts
Specifically the depiction in all the "drugs ruin lives" awareness campaigns from the 80s.
I'm not even joking. These are people whose lives have been slowly consumed by their obsession until they reach the point that there is nothing else there.
The media, which encourages this sort of intense self destruction, should be utterly ashamed of itself. These people are utterly evil because their obsession destroys lives far beyond themselves and their own (former) circles, but they also need help.
And instead of being offered it, politicians, the media, and much of the public, encourages them to sacrifice more and more of their vestigial hu
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I've finally realised what I am reminded of by the end stage of obsessive transphobes like Lineman and Rowling, who start out "having concerns" and end up empty hollow shells of human beings, their friends and family having given up on them, or been driven away, probably neglecting their personal hygiene and health for days on end while they rant about their foaming conspiracy theories on Twitter:
Heroin addicts
Specifically the depiction in all the "drugs ruin lives" awareness campaigns from the 80s.
I'm not even joking. These are people whose lives have been slowly consumed by their obsession until they reach the point that there is nothing else there.
The media, which encourages this sort of intense self destruction, should be utterly ashamed of itself. These people are utterly evil because their obsession destroys lives far beyond themselves and their own (former) circles, but they also need help.
And instead of being offered it, politicians, the media, and much of the public, encourages them to sacrifice more and more of their vestigial humanity to their dreadful obsession, and cheers whilst they do it.
While I’m sure it has been misquoted to hell by now, opiate for the masses still rings true.
The line between religion, ideologies, movements, etc are so blurred it’s all one and the same. And it rots people’s empathy and they are clearly addicted.
They get high on hurting others. Fascism feeds their ego.
I don’t want to hurt them, I want them to wake up and see that they aren’t right or doing good. It’s just hate.
American rail experience: there's a rail line that goes where I want to get to, but the branch lines are all freight lines only these days, so I'll have to pack myself into a crate or take multiple buses.
Yeah. I went to Madrid last month. I went by train, because I feel sufficiently strongly that it's the right thing to do, but the difference in price between the train journey and flying was not funny.
I have To travel regularly to Copenhagen. Bed to office chair is about 6 hrs by plane and 18 hrs overnight by train or driving, and a lot more expensive.
@Sasha And that's the tragedy. You want to do the right thing, but the people who are supposed to be managing our infrastructure aren't interested in facilitating that.
@FeralRobots imo interrail/eurail are pretty fantastic for exploring Europe.
A couple of weeks ago I needed to get to Vienna from Nice, so I took some trains down to the Cinque Terre, explored those for the day and then took a night train from La Spezia to Vienna. I could have flown direct with WizzAir instead and it would have been quicker, a lot simpler and a little cheaper, but much less memorable.
On the other hand: while direct trains can be nice, it's often just as good to have frequent trains with timed connections. gruene.social/@jon/11271632597…
This is somehow right and wrong simultaneously. Sure, some routes we need are missing. *But* for example I’d prefer a Frankfurt-Paris every hour than a Paris-Berlin once a day…
@StrangeNoises There were a group of American and British journalists who went on a tour in the mid-1920s and they set the station clocks forward so their trains appeared to have arrived exactly on time and several of them wrote that their trains always arrived on time in their stories writing up how great Fascist Italy was.
@FeralRobots For touring around on holiday, they're fine, especially because you can get an Interrail/Eurail pass and tickets become much cheaper then. But if you just want to travel from A to B, flying is a lot cheaper.
@StrangeNoises I can't find the source for that story, but I can find several saying that the Italian railway was organised under Mussolini to have the diretissima (fast expresses; the Florence-Rome line is still called that to this day) having priority over local and commuter trains that normal people used so tourists found the service good and locals didn't.
So following the US Supreme Court's logic... if he could assert some kind of national security reason for doing it as an official act, Biden could assassinate Trump and not be prosecuted? #uspol
Something's just occurred to me that's quite telling. I can name favourite (or at least some) Doctor Who stories from every Doctor between 1963 and 1989. From the 2005- series I can only remember one good story off the top of my head and that's Blink.
Wonder if that's a reflection on the length of story as much as anything? 4 x 30min episodes is a lot more to settle into your memory than 2(max) x 45min
@Sion [main] Possibly, yes, and even if a story is rubbish having to tell it over that period means you're more likely to see its redeeming features or appreciate what the author was _trying_ to do.
@Octorine Was that the one that went along with the Empty Child, kids with gasmasks thing? I remember the imagery being scary but the resolution being magic pixie dust or somesuch?
Europe is full of centre right and centre left parties who, rather than oppose far right scapegoating of minorities, have adopted a position of, “those guys are right, don’t vote for them”.
@InkySchwartz The people, united, will never be defeated. Hence why such an incredible amount of resources is used to ensure that this unity is as far away as possible. @argv_minus_one @drbjork @goatsarah
@pettter @argv_minus_one @drbjork For instance, I'm no fan of Spain's Podemos but you read their story and the dirty war waged on them (basicly through a far right judiciary and sell out mass media), man, you'll see it all. The party onced rocked the scene, so the establishment for a brief period worried, pulled the strings and dealt with them. Now they're on their way to irrelevance. They did their part with lots of mistakes but no way they'd've lost so much base just on their own.
Similar story with Syriza in Greece, but then with the EU central bank and various EU big state governments. They deliberately crashed the greek economy into the ground to 'teach them a lesson', presumably the lesson was 'don't you fucking dare elect a leftist government'. @argv_minus_one @drbjork @goatsarah
@kikebenlloch Wait a few years and you have honest-to-god Nazis doing marches and getting the third highest vote share in the parliament. @argv_minus_one @drbjork @goatsarah
@pettter @argv_minus_one @drbjork Exactly, I didn't bring up the example of Greece (now on their way to 6 work-day weeks) on purpose because my knwoledge of it is limited, but your description fits my recollections from the time, how the chessboard was properly shaken by the powers that be. You cannot beat them at their game, the amount of resources at their disposal is huge.
@pettter @argv_minus_one @drbjork I think so. It's a process with its steps. You don't get full nazi massacres on day one. But are we slowly having the post-WW2 welfare societies eroded towards rampant fascism? Well...
@kikebenlloch No this is describing the literal situation in Greece, though they've since lost political relevance, since the state took belated, but firm, action. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_D…
The IT Crowd New Emergency Number! Ever thought 999 was too difficult to remember? Well try this...Subscribe to the Official YouTube Channel http://www.bit.l...
@Sarah Brown @Saxicola ✅ 🏴🇪🇺 The underground has a different announcement these days. It’s not “something that doesn’t look right” but now “something that looks unusual”.
I still have to resist using it to complain about bad graphic design
Currently at Nantes airport having cleared passport control. We were worried given the unorthodox nature of our entry to France that our exit might cause issues.
Thankfully it did not. I think having an EU residency card helps a lot.
yeah, they're basically not allowed to forbid you entry if you're a Schengen country resident. So unless they're actually gonna arrest you, you're fine.
If you arrive at a port where your last port is in the same country or another Schengen country, do you just ignore border stuff, or are you supposed to turn up and at least make a note of your presence?
So it turns out that if you have your own sailboat, you can rock up at Cherbourg Marina and as long as it’s after 6, nobody knows or cares because immigration have gone home to watch the football or some shit.
Illegal border crossing is something you get to do if you’re middle class, apparently.
Yup. You know that Calais trip I tooted about. Customs rarely turned up on our return. Shed loads of yachts and boats and if they can be bothered, one bloke appeared to watch us come ashore.
Good morning from a pre-dawn Gosport Marina where we are about to commence “Operation Oui Oui Baguette”: taking our boat, Scarlet, across the English Channel as the first part of our trip to Portugal. This is the second longest leg of the entire journey, and the first time I will have ever personally sailed out of the sight of land.
Note, that relies on AIS signals being relayed to the internet. Commercial AIS is powerful enough to be picked up by satellite, but ours isn’t, so there will likely be a dead-zone in the middle where we don’t seem to update.
It’s going to take about 14 hours to make the crossing. There is no wind, so we will be using our engine.
Don’t be afraid Sarah. IF they arrive, put the motor in reverse and the rudder max to port or starboard and speed up. That’s quite dangerous for them and they are intellectual mammals so they will choose their battles. This is my theory.
O, really? i didn’t know. So I stop advising and hope with you they choose another area to bother sailors. Stay safe and above all, enjoy this voyage!🥳
This Instituto Camões application form has a drop down field where you can list your occupation. The choices are somewhat eccentric:
Astrólogos. / Astrologers. Parapsicólogos. / Parapsychologists. Toureiros. / Bullfighters. Outros artistas tauromáquicos. / Other bullfighting artists.
The neighbours in Spain might explain the last two but I am at a loss as to why astrologers and parapsychologists make the cut for what is quite a short list.
I am reminded of my dealings with the Job Centre, telling them that I was looking for a job as a lexicographer, which was not in their system. IT is rather a worse omission though!
(the job centre had IT but it didn't have specific subdomains that I was actually looking for like "natural language processing" so it was all a bit of a pointless exercise)
Research reveals toxic PFAS ‘forever chemicals’ accumulate in testes
New research has found for the first time that PFAS “forever chemicals” accumulate in the testes, and the exposure probably affects children’s health.
The toxic chemicals can damage sperm during a sensitive developmental period, potentially leading to liver disease and higher cholesterol, especially in male offspring, the paper, which looked at the chemicals in mice, noted.
“We’ve always been concerned with maternal environmental health effects because women gestate the babies … but this research is really saying there is a paternal contribution to offspring health and development,” Pilsner added.
PFAS alters sperm DNA methylation, which is a process that turns genes on and off, Pilsner said. The methylation patterns can be inherited at fertilization and influence early-life development as well as offspring health later in life.
@petealexharris I’m not a fan of debate so I agree with you. But if someone is coming at you with rhetoric built on falsehood and the trickery of political debate then an effective response is needed, not caving and running away
I think you've put your finger right on it - TERFs are indeed just conservatives of that extreme kind.
I don't really think their views have anything to do with gametes or safe spaces or any of the things they say they're about, because they make no sense in relation to those things.
What I think does explain their views is that conservatives fear any change to a status quo they're invested in - and a certain kind of (generally older) feminist is also invested - I mean intellectually and emotionally - in a neat division of the sexes. They've made that division part of their 'feminist' identity, so they mistake the emergence of cracks in that neat binary as an attack on their own way of being in the world. For them, it's personal.
@christineburns Yes. You stick to a clear statement of your position and don't allow yourself to get derailed.
If your position was highly dubious this wouldn't fly of course. But for example "people have the right to live as their true selves and it isn't within the legitimate authority of the state to say whether they are allowed to" is a good starting point.
Being trans is not a sexual preference, but I can see how this is confusing for you because OMG, you are so obviously a chaser.
Ok, I've just thrown in a new vocabulary word and I'm going to explain it and how it relates to sexuality.
Only 1% of people are trans, but a much larger number of cis people are sometimes attracted to trans people. Looking at pictures of Elliot Page, it's not hard to see why a large number of people would feel a little flutter if he flirted with them.
Other people are specifically into the transness of the people they fancy. Buck Angel's fan base like him because he's a muscle mary, but also because he's trans. And this is part of the beautiful diversity of human sexuality. Fancying trans people is a completely normal for a straight person, for a bi person or for a lesbian or a gay man or for anybody else.
Some people, however, get weird about it. Maybe it's because they feel bad about themselves. Maybe it's because they want to dehumanise people they fancy. They get fucking creepy and weird. Those people, who fetishise random trans people and who see all trans people as inherently sexual and sexualised, we call chasers.
And some of what they do is like to find random married trans women on the internet and "just ask questions" about their sexuality.
We see you, Paul.
However, hope is not lost for you. Go find a dating app and treat trans women like they're people (or at least as much as you treat any women like they're people) and you'll get a lot further.
Anglophone feminism in general has an ideology problem. I learned this while living in France during a formative part of my life. (My twenties.) Having grown up in the 70s, battered by the angry, often hypocritical feminism that was prominent in the States during that era, I had a visceral aversion to the word "feminism".
So when I found myself in a nation of ideologically introspective feminists I had no idea such a thing could exist, and was astonished to find they actually shared some of my resentment of the American movement. I spent much of my time there listening to women and seeking conversations with overt feminists; hell, just finding myself in a place where a man _can_ talk about these things with women was exhilarating. I was completely converted. Frankly, they saved my life. I shudder to think what I might have become in the Internet Age.
So yeah. As French feminists say: "American feminists are more American than they are feminist."
He quit replying when you quit replying because the attention stopped.
He also did not reply to me either because he was offended or because I kept bringing up trans men, which are not interesting for him. That particular genre of being annoying is almost never used against trans men.
Alas, we do also have chasers who are annoying in a completely different way.
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Ooh, friends of my parents had an apartment in Bénodet, and I have fond memories of us staying there. It's possibly changed a lot in, um, 35+ years.
@thelocalecho @zoe
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RAAAAH! Looks like you've got yourselves a convoy.
I'd forgotten to look for a day or two then clicked on the bookmark and saw you're at the exciting bit and making good progress. Good luck with the rest of the trip.
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