Day 1: We left Hendaye in the morning with the hold full of equipment: 5 bags full of prototypes to be filmed, the cameras and our individual bags, half-full of stuff we will never wear, but "just in case"! When we arrived in La Rochelle, we formed two groups: one to buy our provisions, and the other to pick up the keys from the rental company.
Shopping for six turned out to be tiring and quite a headache too. - “Anaïs doesn't like that”, “Lucy doesn't eat this”, “Do you think we've got enough?”, “You've bought too much pasta”, and so on. - And pushing two trolleys, - one of which was full of bottles of water, felt like a workout at the gym
The team in charge of the boat had its work cut out too: They had to check that everything in the boat was OK, that everything was in working order. And all our stuff had to be carefully stowed, so that it wouldn't move at sea.
Once we were all onboard, our shopping was stowed and we had put on our gear, we could cast off: The adventure and the shoot had started!
We set off in mid-afternoon feeling optimistic, with the perhaps over-ambitious goal of reaching Belle-Ile-en-Mer the next day. We organised turns of duty after sunset. Two teams made up of Anaïs/Julien and Mélanie/Lambert kept 2-hour watches, while Lucy and Robin were free to take pictures whenever they felt like it. When we arrived on the Ile d’Yeu at 10 am, we decided to stay at the mooring to recharge the batteries. It was a sensible decision.
Day 2 Our night on duty had left us feeling tired. So we all had breakfast together, then enjoyed a well earned nap. While Lucy and Robin emptied their memory cards and recharged the batteries of their cameras, Melanie took the opportunity to check all the outfits for the shoot. We decided to set sail again in the late afternoon to continue taking pictures of the products while sailing. It was also an opportunity to admire a beautiful sunset over the Atlantic! We were lucky enough to have set off just before the night of the stars, which offered us a fabulous starry spectacle.
Like on the day before, we set off again for another evening shoot. Before leaving, Lucy the tightrope-walking camerawoman, shinned up the mast to film our departure from the port from another angle. We continued shooting until nightfall, before returning to port and continuing to take more pictures during the evening and dinner. We only had one instruction for the shoot:film and photograph sailing scenes and life on board, without playing it up...but it's not easy to eat with cameras always in our faces!
