Owners of larger boats will have to wait until next week to collect them. Around a hundred small vessels anchored in the Arcachon basin set adrift on Friday due to “very degraded” weather conditions, the Atlantic maritime prefecture told AFP. These boats, mainly sailboats, small motor boats or outboards, left their anchorage under the effect of strong winds and the rise in sea level, explained the maritime prefecture, describing a “fairly rare “.
The authorities ask “ship owners not to expose themselves”, “not to risk putting themselves in danger” and “not (…) to check (their) anchorage before the end of the planned alert” Saturday at 8 a.m. “This should also make it possible not to saturate” emergency services “for interventions which would inevitably be delicate for the intervention teams,” added the maritime prefecture.
No damage
According to Cyril Clément, president of the joint union which manages 16 ports in the Arcachon basin, dozens of boats have washed up on the beaches, the rocks and the salt meadows of the municipalities in the north of the basin, mainly coming from Cap-Ferret, at the southern tip of the area. Pushed by a southerly wind, without risk of drifting towards the Atlantic Ocean, these boats whose “mooring lines have given way” have not caused “significant damage”, but cannot be recovered, for the largest of them. them, “until the big tide next week,” explained Cyril Clément.
For Franck Lalande, fisherman in Arcachon and vice-president of the regional maritime fisheries committee, “there is a lot of swell that has come in, the sea has grown” but “there should have been particular vigilance on the part of ship owners on the moorings”, these mooring devices on the basin. Gusts of 113 km/h in Cap-Ferret (Gironde) and 112 km/h in Biscarrosse (Landes) were recorded Friday midday by Météo-France.