At last! A book about the most famous and well attended trad boat festival in the world!
Celebrating Traditional Boats – Glorious Brest: the world’s largest maritime festival in photographs
by Nigel Pert & Dan Houston with a foreword by Sir Robin Knox-Johnston.
Pub: Sea Vista Books, 2020, £17.80, softback, 100pp, 297 x 210mm,
Take a look inside! This is a book for anyone who likes old boats and the traditions of the sea. And of course it would make an ideal gift(!) It’s packed with photographs with short insightful captions, and it covers the trad boat revival as seen at the massive Brest Fêtes Maritimes gatherings since 1992. Nikon-magician Nigel Pert and editor Dan Houston began preparing the book in pre-lockdown February, choosing from tens of thousands of Nigel’s fantastic photographs over the whole period.
It’s come out really well and has a superb high quality feel, that insists on being taken off a coffee table or out of the shelf next to the almanac. It’s large format with big photos and Dan’s explanatory text – in both English and French.
Brest Fêtes, which began in 1992, and runs every four years, should be on any sailor’s bucket list, not just for its size, but for the sheer fun of being there. It is a big festival – that sees nearly 2,000 boats manned (and womanned) by 10,000 sailors in front of a quayside crowd that can pull a million visitors flocking to the Brittany port over the week.
Brest 2020 was Covid-cancelled so sadly no-one made the passage to the beautiful natural harbour in Brittany that year. The festival expects to return in 2024, organisers announced in February 2021. (All the more reason to check out this new book: Celebrating Traditional Boats!)
Sir Robin Knox-Johnston, Britain’s greatest living sailor, and a fan of the festival and joint Patron with Olivier de Kersauson at the last event in 2016 writes an amusing foreword that beautifully sums up the festival – about how he fired a canon from the Thames Sailing Barge Lady Daphne, at the first event in 1992.
With text in French and English there is also a French cover version – Les Fêtes Maritimes de Brest, see right:
Both English and French cover versions are available on this site , in our SHOP page, and also through Amazon. Click for Celebrating Traditional Boats: HERE The book is also available as an ebook direct download: HERE
Et cliquez pour Les Fêtes Maritimes de Brest: ICI
The book is also available as a digital download ebook, from us HERE and online through issuu: HERE
We’ve had some nice comments already, as per our back covers (below) with full text bottom of the page.
Back cover in English. Click image to enlarge.
Couverture arrière, en français
Low resolution screenshot of the contents page… this photo, with its artistic geometry and tricoleur feel is much sharper in the book. Click image to enlarge.
Low resolution view of the Departures chapter, first spread. Click to enlarge.
Ps 22-23 Tall Ships chapter. Click to enlarge.
Low resolution spread of the Skillsets chapter opening page. Click to enlarge.
Low resolution pages 40-41 on the Music makers. Click to enlarge.
Some comments on Celebrating Traditional Boats:
“I have seen more in this book than at all the festivals I have attended. Bravo! For once it’s not a glossy book of boat portraits. And thanks to all these unknown faces (overflowing with joy) you are taken into the heart of the festival. And that does you good!,” Daniel Allisy, former editor Voiles et Voiliers – France’s top sailing magazine
“The great French festival of the sea comes alive in Nigel Pert’s stunning images and Dan Houston’s insightful, informed prose. This is an unrivaled gathering of the world’s maritime traditions, and Pert and Houston take us there., ” Matt Murphy, Editor, WoodenBoat
“A mouth-watering feast for lovers of traditional craft and the people who sail them,” Andrew Bray, editor (retired) Yachting World
“This lively book really reflects the spirit and atmosphere of the Brest festivals, and the immersive cultural event of friendship that takes place between the visitors and sailors from all over the world,” Yann Cariou, Captain of the Tall Ship L’Hermione
“Reading this has made me want to go there to see the boats and also to soak up the atmosphere. When is the next Fête?” Annie Choisy, our French proof reader(!)
From Pete Greenfield editor of Watercraft Magazine and founding editor of Classic Boat Magazine. He wrote this about the book in Watercraft
CELEBRATING TRADITIONAL BOATS
by Nigel Pert & Dan Houston. Pub. Sea Vista Books, Softback ISBN 978 1 8380 6880 6.
£17.80 from www.classicsailor.com
Boats – and certainly not the kind of boats which this glorious full colour album is all about – don’t have coffee tables. But if they did, this is just the volume to grace them.
If you enjoyed Jean-Yves Poirier’s history in W142 of the great French maritime festivals, you may recall they originated in the 19th century as ceremonies to bless fishing fleets, soon augmented by regattas for local craft; regattas which, with the coming of the railways, could attract crowds of day- tripping, boat-loving spectators.
So when the French maritime history magazine le Chasse Marée launched a festival of traditional sail in 1986 in its home port of Douarnenez, the concept was not foreign; local sailors supported it and visitors flocked to it. The fleets at the second edition of the fête in 1988 were more international, their crews welcomed ashore by national pavilions, boatbuilding demos, music and being France, food. It was a triumph for boat history buffs and for local commerce in a workaday town not especially touristique. Other localities started or uprated their own fêtes maritimes. Then, in 1992, the great French naval port of Brest outdid them all with a massively larger celebration, attracting 2000 traditional vessels – from the tallest tall ships to the smallest dinghies – and one million visitors over its four days.
Tall ships aficionado Nigel Pert has been official photographer for the Brest Festival organisers for many of those celebrations and his portraits of the vast variety of boats and those who crew them are the raison d’etre of this book. Accompanying them are are genuinely informative captions – in both English and French – by Dan Houston, for 15 years editor of Classic Boat magazine.
Until this year, France could offer a growing gallimaufry of maritime festivals, some convivial, some competitive, some small and specialist; some large enough for all-comers across Europe and beyond. The crowded calendar of events, along both sea coasts – la Semaine du Golfe Morbihan and Fécamp Grande Escale on the Atlantic; L’Escale à Sete on the Med – and on rivers – the enormous riverboat festival on the Loire – made scheduling for visiting vessels, enthusiasts and magazine photographers a challenge. Then we got Covid and Brest and Douarnenez 2020 were cancelled. Should they re-schedule both for 2021? Or will that create a clash with May’s Semaine du Golfe, still on the calendar as we go to press? Perhaps Brest and DZ will wait for 2022? In the meantime, enthusiasts will need this book.
From Emily Harris, founder, Classic Yacht TV
Celebrating Traditional Boats
Brittany – it’s as enchanting and dramatic as Cornwall but the reception you’ll get, if you arrive by boat, is likely tenfold. From GRP, carbon, composite and wooden boats, to inshore and offshore sailors, the French are all-inclusive about sailing and very enthusiastic about vessels and those who explore the sea.
Every four years the Brest Festival epitomises this enthusiasm and a newly-published photobook by the former editor of Classic Boat magazine, Dan Houston and French residing, English-born photographer, Nigel Pert perfectly illustrates the event’s magic.
While the French celebrate all aspects of sailing and yacht design, the Brest Festival focuses solely on wooden boats, attracting the largest international wooden boat fleet in the world, with 2,000 vessels in the historic 1992 edition.
Dan and Nigel’s book covers all kinds of craft from many nations, giving us tantalizing memories of life on the water before 2020. Sir Robin Knox-Johnston’s foreword details the friendly rivalry between French and British crews; Dan Houston describes the food, music and wider ‘salty’ culture laid on in this home of the French Navy, the huge natural deep-water pool that is the harbour of Brest.
The opening pages feature Nigel Pert’s close-up shots of a mish-mash of coloured sails and wooden-planked hulls rafted up, which is what you might observe while taking a breather from the shore-side activities – maybe from a pew on a harbour wall to soak up this multi-dimensional festival experience.
If you’ve been to Brest, during the festival, you’ll have seen the Brazilian jangadas, which have little-to-no free-board – their crews standing up to trim the hull. Photographs of traditional boatbuilders at work will bring back memories of watching those craftsmen and women – their eyes piercing with determination, perseverance and the often arduous, heavy work it takes to preserve these historic vessels. Then you’ll see Nigel’s sailing portraits of grown men and women whose faces are now gleaming with a newly-realised childhood ambition; crews huddled down on leeward rails under a sail, all adorned in classic Breton stripes.
Turning the pages it takes you from a large image of the perfectly captured lines of the 1991 Concarneau sardinier replica, MARCHE AVEC, to an intimate portrait of Nigel’s wife, strumming a guitar aboard the Tall Ship STAD AMSTERDAM. Next, I’m interested in the ‘boat art’ that’s been captured in an exhibition of wooden boards – where crews have painted scenes that best represent their boat – a really colourful medley.
The book describes how the French live and breathe their sailing culture, and how at Brest they encourage outsiders to do the same. A night scene shows two girls fortune-telling with a pack of cards, against the ever-so-slightly misty, smokey background of traditional boats packed alongside a quay. And then there’s Nigel’s reportage shot, of a deep vat of Croatian seafood stew being simmered over a firebox, on deck!
Many types of boats have been to Brest, and some like LA RECOUVRANCE, were built with public and private funds by volunteers and employees. She’s a replica gaff-rigged tops’l schooner whose voluptuous lines are illustrated through a more grainy set of 1992 launch-sequence images. There’s a whole chapter of launchings with huge crowds there to cheer the likes of MARIE FERNAND’s launch, in 2008. The angle at which Nigel shot this La Havre pilot cutter in the slings is just fantastic.
The number of people attending these Brest Festivals – both the crowds and the sailors who bring their boats here, is unparalleled with another country, in my opinion. And all elements of life are intertwined between the sea and these beautiful boats. It’s impressive and while we wait for such a large fleet to gather in that space again, you can feel the warmth of like-minded wooden boat enthusiasts in this photobook.