With Pamela Lee preparing to race across the Atlantic in the Route du Rhum, WM Nixon explores the remarkable maritime history of St Malo, from corsairs and giant tides to its connections with Irish sailors and St Brendan the Navigator.
In recent weeks, the buildup has been accelerating towards tomorrow’s start (Sunday November 1st) of the four-yearly Route du Rhum Race from St Malo in northwest Brittany, 3,542 sea miles Transatlantic to the Caribbean with a finish at Point-a-Pitre in the attractive French island of Guadeloupe.
The historic fortified port of St Malo is totally en fete, with space somehow found for the largest Race Village ever set up for any sailing event of this kind to be in place, and buzzing mightily with it. In the docks, the fleet of 115 entries in six classes includes the numerically largest division, the 49 boats in the Class40 solos, in which Ireland’s hopes are with Pamela Lee of Greystones on EmpowHer.
The giant Ultime trimarans at St Malo this week
13TH EDITION, AND AT HALLOWE’EN TOO
Because of the four-yearly stagings, the race’s Golden Jubilee in 2028 will be by-passed, though by then the buildup will be already under way to the 2030 staging, the 14th edition. Meanwhile it’s probably in poor taste to point out that this is the 13th Edition and it’s starting at Hallowe’en too, for the Route du Rhum contest has already experienced the loss at sea of such sailing super-stars as Alain Colas in the first race in 1978, and Loic Caradec in 1986.
SERIOUS CHALLENGE
In other words, it’s an extremely serious challenge for even the most seasoned skippers. But at least it looks as though the mid-Autumn start tomorrow (Sunday) will experience unseasonably gentle weather, with a favourable nor’east breeze to waft the fleet out of the Channel, and safely past Ouessant into the wide open spaces of the North Atlantic.
Vauban towers are a feature of the defences of the citadel port of St Malo.
This is all to the good, as the huge fleets in times past have experienced inter-boat collisions in the crowded early stages when they have to beat west. But this time round, having reached the ocean with a fair wind, the low pressure currently nearest to their route is a modestly shallow affair close south of the Azores, though over towards Newfoundland there’s a busier bit of stormy work expected at around 969 hPa eastward of Newfoundland.
FIRST RACE IN 1978
The inaugural race in 1978 provided a first indication of the variety of sailors and boats this ultra-event can provide, as it was won by the Canadian Mike Birch racing the little 11 metre trimaran Olympus Photo by just 98 seconds on the water from France’s Michel Malinovsky racing the 21m monohull Kriter V.
The winner of the first Route du Rhum in 1978, Canadian Mike Birch was already 44 when he took up long-distance offshore racing, and was 90 when he died at his home in France in 2022.
Mike Birch, who settled in northwest France where he died aged 90 in 2022, was quite the character. Until the age of 44, he was very much the Canadian outdoorsman, resolutely active on land at all altitudes. But then he discovered solo ocean racing and went at it with all the zeal of the convert, even though he subsequently had the problem of having to carry the glitter of that initial Route du Rhum victory through some less successful campaigns.
HEATH ROBINSON TRIMARAN
As for the two leading boats, there’s definitely a touch of the Heath Robinson machine about Birch’s winning tri, while Malinovsky’s Kriter V would not immediately be recognized as an Andre Mauric design. For instead of his usual elegant creations, Mauric was persuaded to design an object of such spiky ends that photographers sometimes find it difficult to include the ultra-long bow and stern.
“All sticks and string….” Inaugural winner Olympus Photo seems a rough bit of work by comparison with today’s highly sophisticated trimarans.
Beaten into second place by just 98 seconds on the water in the first Route du Rhum, the 69ft LOA Kriter V has such pointy ends that the photographer doesn’t always manage to include them.
Perhaps they thought they were creating an up-date on Ted Turner’s 12 Metre American Eagle, which had so surprisingly dominated international offshore racing in the late 1960s and early 1970s. But it is difficult to discern the character of the mighty Eagle in this eccentric machine, which still sails the sea as a fast chartering cruiser.
ULTIME TRIMARANS DOMINATE THE LEAD
But in terms of record speed, the Route du Rhum is now dominated by the huge Ultime trimarans, which may be at the finish within a week. They will be setting the starting procedure in place by leaving the docks today through the sea locks which are the key to making St Malo work as a port, as the place is Super-tide Central, with Europe’s largest tidal range at 13 metres – it’s just short of 43ft for those who think in terms of old money.
Cruising the relatively tideless Baltic or Mediterranean, you soon realise what a nuisance tide has been for those who would create harbours where people need them. Yet the point of St Malo is that it prospered as a privateering and corsair port because the people who settled there saw the huge tides and the many offlying rocks not as problems, but rather as opportunities to create an easily defended citadel port, virtually inaccessible to strangers.
Piling it on, St Malo corsair style.
FAST-SAILING PREDATORS
Thus St Malo developed its own line in fast-sailing predatory little ships to such an extent that when the sheer weight of the Royal Navy in the English Channel brought British dominance with it, anyone sailing under three layers of sail was liable to be automatically shot at if they didn’t make good their escape pronto.
Even in the faintest breeze, the St Malo rig provides useful speed. Photo: Virginia Spencer
Consequently St Malo is something of a place apart, and the locals will tell you that they’re neither Breton nor Norman nor indeed French, but they’re proud Malouines and that’s all there is to it. It certainly provided us with one of our best runs ashore in many decades of cruising, for back in 1996 we made our way there to honour the Centenary of a St Malo-based boat which had been built by James Kelly of Portrush in 1896.
As we’d arrived on a summer’s morning with the tide still too low for the sea lock, we pushed our way up the soft channel to starboard and the dredged small boat basin off the Yacht Club de Dinard. This establishment – renowned for its long links with the RORC and the annual Cowes-Dinard-St Malo Race (won in 2026 by the French boat Sun Hill IV) was theoretically closed on this Monday morning, but somehow we ended up having an excellently convivial lunch in the clubhouse cooked by the lifeboat cox’n and hosted by the club steward.
Just the spot for an excellent French light lunch rustled up by the lifeboat cox’n, the Yacht Club de Dinard is a stronghold of Flying Fifteen racing in France.
INTRIGUING HISTORY OF ST MALO
It was quite the act to follow when we finally got into the dock across in St Malo, but that extraordinary place fulfilled every expectation. That said, paying our respects to the hundred-year-old Portrush-built boat would have had even greater significance had we been more aware of the full history of St Malo.
For you really couldn’t make it up. It seems there was this long-lived Welsh monk Malo or Maclovius (520 to 621AD), who was born in Llancarfan in Glywysing in Wales, and became a favoured disciple of St Brendan the Navigator.
In his younger days, the Welsh monk Malo crewed for St Brendan the Navigator on his ocean voyages. Photo: Cotton Coulson
He voyaged the Atlantic with our Irish sailor/saint for several years before deciding that it was time to set up his own show. This was done by establishing a religious community on what was then a rocky island off the north coast of Brittany, and today at the heart of the citadel port the cathedral of St Malo will celebrate his feast day on November 15th, by which time much of the fleet in the Route du Rhum-Destination Guadeloupe (to give it the full title) will have completed the 13th edition of this extraordinary race.
Didn’t he do well? The Welsh monk who voyaged with St Brendan the Navigator, then set up a commune in northwest Brittany where he became a bishop and then archbishop, lived to a hundred years old, and is now venerated every November 15th as St Malo
Meanwhile, almost twice a day the uniquely glorious port of St Malo will be a place which has the sea on its doorstep almost to excess, but equally almost twice a day it’s a place where the sea seems to have disappeared almost completely across endless tracts of sand and rock.
