Back in Cherbourg

September 4, 2026

My time in Saint-Malo has come to an end, and while I really enjoyed the location and the cycling in the region, it was time to leave after a month and a few days. It’s worth noting that I read five books while in St Malo and rode almost 2000km. It was a nice stop and I am happy to move on but even happier that I was there to enjoy the space.

For my next stop, I went to Granville for a couple of days to see what that town was like. It was a nice place and a little more time would have been good. But I was there long enough to see the Christian Dior family home/museum, visit a church and get out on a couple of bike rides. I could have spent more time there but time marches on and I need to move along. [Some other notes, there is a sill and very high tides. The town has an old walled area, a long beach, casino, a number of restaurants and lots of cute shops. Big hills are nearby for climbing but they are short.]

After that, I moved North to Barneville-Carteret and stayed there for two days as well. This port is a lot more quaint and difficult to get to (by boat), as the sill requires a little more caution. I was told that I could go in at 9pm (I need 1.8m of water), and I headed in when the water level meter on the entry posts said 3m. I found out the next day that the sill is at 1.5m. I was pretty lucky I didn’t hit that sill.

In any case this little marina is even more quaint, but it is in the middle of (almost) nowhere. The town has a few shops and some nice restaurants, but given that the town is basically shut down now (fall is coming fast), there wasn’t much to do. I did manage a couple of bike rides and really enjoyed the landscape here. The hills were much longer and there was a couple of very steep hills just beyond the port to give me a very good workout over short distances.

As I have menitoned in previous posts, I am heading back to the UK to get work done on the dinghy and will take advantage of the opportunity to get even more work done on Home Free to prepare for a longer cruising period in the Med over the next couple of years. So I am on a schedule to get back to the UK and as usual, that is a problem just waiting to happen.

Yesterday after leaving Carteret around lunch time, the boat got beat up a bit heading North into the wind and the waves, but beause I was on a falling tide, the speeds were good. Then I turned the corner toward Cherbourg [You go through what is called ‘the race’ and it is a wild area where currents/tides collide and make the water crazy] and with the wind behind things did get a little better after getting through the race.

During the wildness on the route North, I didn’t spend much time thinking about my engine room, but once things settled down I made a trip to the engine room to check things out and boy am I lucky. I have horseshoes, at least as it relates to the boat. Home Free has a pretty big transmission that connects the engine to the shaft. It’s a ZF gearbox and it drives a big propellor but it is a bit weird because the transmission oil filter is on top of the transmission, upside down. Well, it is not a ZF original equipment filter, and I had heard that they can fail due to the pressure in this transmission and I suspect that’s what happened. It failed.

When I opened the engine room door it was spewing oil everywhere (not an over-exagerration). As I write this, I have just finished a couple of hours of cleaning oil from the engine room and that’s after an hour or so yesterday just to sop up the oil on the floors. In any case, I have replaced the filter, put in some new oil and should be good for the run to the UK tomorrow.

One side effect of that is that I ran on my wing engine for a couple of hours yesterday while I was waiting for the main to cool off enough for me to work on it. That worked pretty well, although my tachometer stopped working somewhere in there, so I have to check on that. I also discovered that the autopilot cannot hold a heading with the wing engine which is a pretty significant problem. I will have to reach out to Raymarine to figure out if I can change the configuration in any way to improve the following with the wing engine. [The wing engine is offset from the centre of the boat and so it is always pushing from the port (left hand) side and generally requires about a 15 degree adjustment to the rudder angle.]

So today is mostly about cleaning up and getting ready to head back to the UK. That’s it for now.