During a year when I have been heavily involved in restoring a house, I have managed to get away in my cruising dinghy just a few times. During one of these her hull became damaged, so that Avel Dro began to leak badly during a planned weekend passage to a little maritime festival at Pors Beac'h.
PUFFINS TREK
This admirable enterprise on the North Breton coast organised the trip out to the Ile Vierge. Puffin's Trek hire out cruising dinghies and create organised dinghy tours. They invited me to go and give a talk about dinghy cruising in Avel Dro, even in my execrable French.
www.puffins-trek.fr
MUSIC
Lonely River - Roots and Recognition
Footprints in the Sand - Roots and Recognition featuring Melanie Bell
- both from Epidemic Sound
www.epidemicsound.com
ADDITIONAL PHOTOGRAPHY
Abigail Heard
Diego Le Grelle
INTERESTED IN DINGHY CRUISING?
Read my book, 'The Dinghy Cruising Companion'
www.bloomsbury.com
And join the Dinghy Cruising Association:
www.dinghycruising.org.uk
AVEL DRO
Do you want a boat like mine?
Avel Dro is an Ilur designed by François Vivier, and built of clinker plywood by Les Charpentiers Reunis of Cancale in 1994. I bought her in France in 2003 to import her into the UK, and more recently returned her to France again. The design is based closely on the traditional inshore fishing boats of Brittany in the early years of the twentieth century - hence her simple boom-less lugsail rig and lack of a mainsheet horse, (sometimes controversial among my viewers). Although rare in Britain, Ilurs are relatively common in France. Modern Ilurs are however slightly different internally from mine, as they have more built in buoyancy. The name Avel Dro is Breton, Avel = wind, Dro = to turn - so it means a whirlwind.
Length 4.44 m
Sail area 12.2 m²
Beam 1.70 m
Draught 0.25 / 0.86 m
Displacement loaded with camping and sailing gear 400 kg
Design category C3
François Vivier's website (in English):
www.vivierboats.com/en/
Similar dinghies can often be found for sale on the website of the French magazine Le Chasse-Marée:
www.chasse-maree.com/revue/
Or try Le Bon Coin - where you can buy anything in France:
www.leboncoin.fr
POST-BREXIT BOAT BUYING
Since January 2021, when Great Britain (but not Northern Ireland) left the European Single Market, if you buy a boat in France or elsewhere in the EU and import it into the UK, you will become liable for VAT and other duties on the import - even if it is second hand. Similar charges are due if you take a British boat the other way. This does not apply to a boat taken to another country for a holiday, however.