A red beacon to port, green to starboard. This is the first view offered by the island of Groix to boats entering Port-Tudy. Barely 7 nautical miles from the harbor of Lorient, the two lights open and close the island access, like lookouts. At the end of the XIXe century, when they were erected, the island saw the great period of tuna fishing with 1,800 sailors and a fleet of 280 dundees coming and going. These rigs with their slender bows and large sails carried Greek sailors, the other name for Groisillons, to the Bay of Biscay in search of albacore tuna. On the bell tower of the Saint-Tudy church, in the village, a scrap fish sits as a weather vane.
Groix is a fishing island by tradition. Sailing on the sea should be second nature here. In Size of the islands (1945), the ethnologist traveler Odette de Puigaudeau is told by an old sea dog the story of Marie-Jeanne Kersaho, a sailor woman from Groix, at the end of the 19th century.e century : “She was a very strong girl who knew how to command. Her sailors had no reason to flinch and, when she found them drunk, you had to see her knock on them! A good girl and a good sailor. » At a time when navigation was forbidden to women, she went from Groix to fish for lobsters and crayfish.
But on this small island of Morbihan, not sectarian, “long adopted” or some “brand new arrivals” can also write a page of their own history. This is the case of Patrick Saigot, who, in 2002, engages in mussel farming. Born in the Paris region, he is 28 years old, has a degree in biology and has never really sailed before. “I left Port-Tudy as early as possible, from 5 a.m., to escape the heard glances of former retired fishermen sitting like a little “court””, remembers the one who is now in his fifties. He will hold on, uplifting mussels groisillonnes for eighteen years, despite a “hard work for the mind, difficult to control, because everything happens at sea”.
Sea green eyes, tanned complexion, solid build, Patrick Saigot strolls along the quay of the small port of Locmaria, in the south of the island, with the look of a long-distance sailor. “Groix, when I was a kid, it was only for the holidays. I came there with my parents who had fallen in love with the island. They bought a small house there in the 1970s. I made a lot of friends there. My imagination was built at that time.he recalls.
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